Hard Drive Prices Slide As Thai Flood Aftermath Subsides 155
New submitter yeszomgpony writes "For the first time since the Thailand flooding, hard drive prices are finally starting to decrease. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week. From the article: 'Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data. "For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said. IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.'"
Prices and Warranty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure seems like there's a shortage... I asked around whether anyone needed a few of my old ass hard drives on one of the local (German) hardware forums, and received a trade of a slightly castrated Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs of RAM and an ASUS mainboard for just a 500gig 3.5" SATA drive and an 80gigger notebook drive... both well used, of course. A few weeks ago, this wouldn't have been possible, with the hard drives worth pennies and the other hardware worth 40-50€.
Glad to hear the shortage is coming to an end though... I really need to upgrade my NAS. Last time I did that, 1TB drives were in the sweet spot... getting a bit full.
just in time (Score:2, Insightful)
hmmn seems conveniently timed to be more expensive while people are buying Christmas presents and they go back to regular pricing after the Xmas shopping rush, no there is no taking advantage disaster at all here to price gouge the consumer
Quality Control? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quality Control? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
So in other words, the free market will function in exactly the way it's supposed to
Re:its bullshit (Score:2, Insightful)
Ideally nothing. To suggest that the free market has an ideal or purpose or positive outcome short or long term is as foolish as to suggest that intelligent design underlies evolution and guides it benevolently.
The free market, for whatever necessarily restricted implementation of free market exists today, is a game which you win if you play well. Other people may benefit, or they may be unaffected, or they may have their enjoyment of life severely damaged. The only thing we can guarantee is that the winners usually tell everyone else that their win has been for everyone else's good too.
Re:Prices and Warranty (Score:4, Insightful)
Redundancy (Score:2, Insightful)
This news reveals an important piece: The is no real redundancy in the suppliers when in comes to important parts of todays' devices. I often see* that the hard disk array suppliers keep buying them from a couple of asian outfits thinking they will be safe hands. But the asian hardware vendors themselves buy/order from the same manufacturer of platters/board/NAND creating a single point of failure scenario.
There should be a clear visibility of the supply chain of not just the end/whole product but also the key components of it. In another story, heard that shipping of Sonys' SEL50F18 lenses for NEX cameras are pushed to Mar'12 after users payed for it, for the same reason.
* working for a big storage co.
PS: Misread Flood as Food.
Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly, a perspective. Let me explain what that means:
In this huge world with 7 billion people, every 3 minutes, about 600 die. (On average about 3 per second). And our population growth is so fast that the 600 dead had been replaced (sorry for the dry factual choice of words) before the floods even hit the news. ... But the harddrive problem affects the world, albeit in a modest way, for months.
So yeah, it seems the editors really do have a sense of perspective. Maybe you prefer a more emotional perspective... but if you want to mourn every couple of hundred people that die, you'd better empty your agenda. It's a full time job.
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
But only for the oooh shiny crowd. I simply held off buying any hard drives. Would I have liked to expand capacity? yes. Would I have liked to buy 12 new machines? yes.
Did I kill people or lose money because I did not? no.
Honestly, the price jump was only because of idiots that rushed out and bought drives when they heard of a possible "shortage" and thus created a shortage.
Re:its bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's what it did. Initially, the demand curve didn't shift, but the supply took a huge hit. The price increase allowed the market to adjust, and eventually (quite quickly, apparently) subsided as capacity has been (partially at least) recovered (perhaps using existing capacity with reduced QC, as evidenced by the warranty cut...) and substitute products have been sought (some products may be forgoing HDs in favor of much smaller but still adequate SSDs, for instance).
This is exactly how the market is supposed to work. It's not supposed to be constantly at some steady-state "ideal" price. That's how planned economies work, and results in either or both of shortages and waste.
The only evidence of anything like market failure is the warranty cut, that cut across all manufacturers. One would've expected someone to hold out and become the "quality" producer. But even that is a stretch as the warranties were not cut across all product lines for all manufacturers.
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
So - How can you stop boom and bust - the simplest way is to flood the market, and not let anyone know! Good luck with that strategy.
Alternatively, you can try lying a lot, and hoping no one notices (its called communism). Doesn't work very well in practice.
Re:really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:its bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
With the current trend of a few large companies controlling the market it is getting harder and harder to find markets where the free market model still applies.
This isn't a current trend, it's always been the trend: in any market, as the market matures, the number of suppliers shrinks through attrition and mergers, until there's only a handful of really big companies controlling the whole market. Just look at the automotive market for example: in the USA alone, there used to be dozens of car makers in the early 20th Century, but by 1970 it had shrunk down to 4 main players; it only opened up again when more foreign makers entered the market, namely the Japanese.
Appliances: there's only 3 or so American appliance makers (Whirlpool, GE, Maytag), although recently we've gotten more foreign brands (Samsung, LG, Bosch).
This is just the natural order of things: as a market matures, the players buy each other out or go out of business, until you're left with a few large competitors. Sometimes a monopoly results (or close, with one player being the dominant competitor with a large majority of the marketshare). This is why government regulation is necessary at this stage, to "keep the playing field level" and prevent entrenched players from keeping newer, smaller competitors out of the market the way they did with Tucker cars.
Allowing a free market with little or no regulation is great when a market is immature and there's lots of players and competition (and there's few or no health or safety issues to worry about, like with food); but after a while it becomes necessary or else you get a situation like Microsoft circa 2000, bullying everyone and stifling innovation.