Hard Drive Prices Up 150% In Less Than Two Months 304
zyzko writes "The Register reports that hard drive prices (lowest average unit prices) have rocketed 151% from October 1 to November 14th. The worst days have seen over 5% daily price increases. This is commonly attributed to the floods in Thailand, but there are concerns of artificial price fixing and suspicion that retailers or members of the supply channel are taking advantage of the situation."
The number varies when you break it down to individual drives, but it seems to be in the right ballpark. Anecdotally, the drive I picked up on Oct. 14th would cost me 135% more today. The flood waters in Thailand have partially receded, but aren't expected to be completely gone until early December. The damage to the country's economy and property is measured in the tens of billions.
No, no, no (Score:5, Interesting)
They aren't up 150%.
They're up 400%.
Never thought 500 GB drives would come back into style...and yet they're what my friends are specc'ing into their machines these days.
Re:No, no, no (Score:5, Funny)
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That's okay. We just store stuff in the cloud nowadays.
And what, pray tell, do you imagine the cloud stores data on? Turtles?
Re:No, no, no (Score:5, Funny)
It is clouds all the way down.
Re:No, no, no (Score:5, Funny)
And what, pray tell, do you imagine the cloud stores data on? Turtles?
It's turtles . . . all the way down.
The trouble with storing stuff in the clouds, is that it falls back to the ground when it rains, and causes floods. But in the case of Thailand, it will get recycled back into new storage, so we will have renewable storage.
Probably.
Does that make it Green?
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The trouble with storing stuff in the clouds, is that it falls back to the ground when it rains, and causes floods. But in the case of Thailand, it will get recycled back into new storage, so we will have renewable storage.
Not only that, but with reduced CO2 emissions as a direct result of fewer spinning hard drives drawing power from the electrical grid and the increased albedo from all that data being stored in clouds, we've also solved global warming! Go team!
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Yeah, Drop Box dropped my storage 150%!!
Re:No, no, no (Score:5, Interesting)
A more serious question occurred to me in response to the joke: Has the price of quantity purchases of hard drives skyrocketed like the retail prices? If Amazon or Google want to build another server farm, will they be paying much more than they would have paid a month ago? —If it's only the retail prices that have increased so drastically, then I'd see that as a sign that someone in the supply chain is just taking advantage of a chance to reap a windfall profit. Big purchasers naturally have more clout with suppliers than do individual buyers; if they thought they were being ripped off, they'd buy from another vendor, and no vendor wants to lose that kind of business—so no sensible vendor would jerk around a major customer by raising prices when they didn't have to. However, wholesale suppliers can't afford to sell huge quantities of drives at a loss, so if there truly is a general shortage of drives, they'd all have to raise prices for even the big buyers. Can anyone involved in purchasing large lots of hard drives supply any insight with regard to this question?
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The biggest cost of new hard drives, will be rebuilding the hard disk drive plants in regions, with stable weather, low tectonic incidence and politically stable. That the hard disk drive plants were built in flood prone locations means that a group of people need a good butt kicking. Brings to mind things like saved pennies to spend pounds and stupid is as stupid does.
Re:No, no, no (Score:4, Informative)
I read an article last week about how they are on average, 25% more expensive. Looking at many of the online retailers and some local vendors, most are 3x more expensive.
I bought a 2TB WD20EARS in September for $69, they are $299 at every local store now. The WD RE4 and Seagate ES drives are $399 for 2TB, which is only about 2x.
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Not brick-and-mortar vendors, at least not in the DC area-- theyre about 150-200% normal price.
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I bought a bunch of 2TB drives (six Seagate 'green' drives for a NAS) about the same time you did from Newegg. They were $70; the same drives are now $230.
Re:No, no, no (Score:4, Funny)
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I bought a 3TB Deskstar for $130 on Sept 28. Current price is now $250.
The current price is 192% of the old price.
That's a price increase of 92%. Colloquially, the price is up 92%.
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Back during the flash glut I bought a couple 64G USB sticks. They have to be the only piece of computer equipment I have ever owned that appreciated in value.
Congrats to anyone who bought a large number of drives for a home fileserver before they spiked but never got around to installing them.
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Re:No, no, no (Score:4, Interesting)
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What a crock. (Score:3, Informative)
I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%. It's just like the time RAM prices went thru the roof years ago, far higher than should have been caused by whatever problem caused a temporary shortage and they stayed artificially inflated for years. Same thing's going to happen with hard drives. Manufacturers will milk this for years.
Re:What a crock. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.
Why not? If demand is sufficiently inelastic, prices could go up 1000% if even 5% of the production capacity disappears.
Re:What a crock. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I think demand is very elastic at this point. It spiked like crazy over the last few weeks as people scrambled to buy as many drives as they could lay their hands on before all of the vendors jacked their prices. The high inflation caused a run on the existing supply. Now demand is going to plunge as people who were adding capacity, just because they could, stop buying drives. But I don't expect prices to come down even as the supply recovers. Insurance will pay to rebuild (and relocate if they're smart) the factories but we'll have inflated prices for a long time.
Re:What a crock. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, hard drives are commodities, like orange juice, gas, oil, etc.
Prices are inflated now simply because everyone's got the "OMG I NEED A DRIVE NOW!!!" fever. Then again, drives today aren't any more expensive than they were just a year ago.
So if you have no need for a spare hard drive, don't be a sucker and buy now. If you find a sale, great, if not, hold off.
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
I'm guessing everyone's in a frenzy, but they'll recover in a few months and if it's been sitting on the shelf the whole time while you "stocked up", you'll look silly.
In short - buy if you really need it (and take notice in that drive prices really aren't sky high - they're just where they were last year or the year before). If you don't, just wait it out.
We thought we'd be stuck with $150 barrels of oil. They dropped under half that a year later.
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Yes and no, some drives have tripled in price while others have seen modest gains. Checking local stores, I see that the WD Caviar Green 2T drive that used to be on sale for $65 every week is now $180. However, the WD Caviar Green 3T drive that used to be in the $220 range is now... *drumroll* ...$250. Now, I'm pretty sure the 2T drive was significantly less than $180 when it was released several years ago.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I guess people are still buying the 2T drives instead of the
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You can't boot from a 3T drive under Windows unless you have EFI instead of the normal PC BIOS, which most systems don't have. So once again, it's all Microsoft's fault.
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SSDs vs. Spinning Platters (Score:4, Interesting)
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
That's an interesting point—that SSD capacity is driven by Moore's law, but spinning disk drives are not. If that's true, you might think that SSDs would overtake spinning platters in a few years, wouldn't you? So platters would be out and SSDs would be the ubiquitous storage medium that hard drives are now. (I realize that this point is tangential to your main comment, and that you didn't actually assert it strongly. So I'm not really arguing with you—I just find the idea interesting, and wanted to spend a little time thinking about it.)
So when will solid state devices overtake mechanical hard drives? The first thing to consider is that while mechanical drives are not subject to Moore's Law, this technology has had an extraordinarily long life, marked by a pretty amazing growth in data capacity, accompanied by a dramatic reduction in size and power requirements, as well as an increase in I/O rates and a steep decline in prices. Being lazy, I just took a look at the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on the history of hard drives. It's a pretty amazing story.
When they were first invented at IBM in 1956, disk drives had a capacity of 5 Megabytes, and were the size of about 6 or 7 full-size refrigerators placed back-to-back. (See the Wikipedia image [wikipedia.org] of this device.) About 10 years later, IBM's multi-platter drives were up to 29 Meg. This is not quite what you'd get from a device that follows Moore's law, of course: disk drives grew in capacity a factor of 6; Moore's law would have dictated that they increase by a factor of about 20 over the same 10 years.
However, the growth between 1970 and 1980 was more spectacular. In 1970, the biggest IBM "disk pack" had a capacity of 100 Meg. By 1980, we were up to 2.52 Gigabytes...a capacity increase of about 25 times—a growth in excess of Moore's law!. Significantly, the 1980 device was down to the size of a single refrigerator, and only cost $40,000.
The Wikipedia article has a graph [wikipedia.org] that plots the growth in capacity of hard drives between 1980 and the present (2011). According to the graph, hard drives have increased in capacity at the rate of about 100 times every ten years. Wow.
Actually, I could have saved myself some time (and painful arithmetic) by just finding the article on Kryder's Law first. Mark Kryder published an article in Scientific American in 2005, in which he asserted that hard drive capacity doubles annually. From the article:
So maybe the answer to the question, "When will solid state devices replace disk drives?" is, "never"!
My own experiences incline me to be skeptical of claims that hard drives will be replaced any time soon by something totally different. Back in 1982, when I first decided to make my living "doing stuff with computers", I took a Data Processing 100 class at the local junior college (hey, tuition was cheap, as I was teaching Philosophy at the same institution). The textbook for the course asserted that while spinning platters were now the best method of online data storage (you put all the stuff you didn't absolutely need to ac
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Newegg is trying to fight against that, and its rather annoying. They will only sell a single drive per customer. They had no problem selling me motherboards, processors, and superMicro server chassis.. but when I asked for 12 drives (two 6 bay servers) even over the phone.. they said no..
Very annoying.. I wasn't trying to 'stock up' I needed them for a project..
Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocations (Score:4, Informative)
Just to add to the parent, you also have to factor in contractually obligated allocations. Western Digital and Seagate already signed contracts with OEMs for Q4 (if not beyond) - at this point they're locked into selling a specific number of drives at a specific price. Short of going bankrupt, breach of contract is rarely the better option.
So while there may be a 25% shortage overall, what we're really looking at is supplies and prices in the retail market (anyone selling "retail" drives), and the spot market (OEMs, white box builders, and e-tailers like Amazon that sell "OEM" drives), the two of which are for all intents and purposes the open market. The result of those OEM contracts means that the entire 25% shortage needs to be absorbed by the open market. And since most hard drives are sold on contract to OEMs in the first place, the actual shortage in the open market is easily 50% if not more.
This compounded with the portion of drive sales that are inelastic, and some dealer panic/greed are what has driven up prices so high. 150% in these circumstances is quite high (and there's no getting around that), but it's completely rational for such a major shortage.
If it makes you feel any better, the OEMs will be getting screwed when they start their new contracts. At that point the OEM and open markets will be back in equilibrium - OEMs won't be able to suck up drives for cheap - and the shortage will be better shared by both parties. Drives will still be expensive, but they shouldn't be quite as expensive as they are now.
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Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.
Re:Don't Forget Contractually Obligated Allocation (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I don't have the specific knowledge of WDC and Seagate contracts you profess, many/most contracts have "outs" for act-of-god situations, which would apply here.
Yes, but to invoke "force majeure" - as I know it best - you must be truly unable to supply. You can't just bail on your OEM contracts because it'd be more profitable to sell them on the open market, so the open market has to absorb the whole shortage first and only then, if you're still unable to supply the OEM market can you invoke it. The OEMs would probably also have rights to a delayed fulfillment so any backlog must be cleared first before they can supply the rest of the market. So while what you say is true, it doesn't really change anything the GP said. It really only shields the HDD manufacturers from liability due to breach of contract.
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"Act of God" is a legal term. It has a very specific definition, which oddly enough, does not take into account God's actions as part of the definition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God [wikipedia.org]
An act of God is an unforeseeable natural phenomenon. Explained by Lord Hobhouse in Transco plc v Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council as describing events;
(i) which involve no human agency
(ii) which is not realistically possible to guard against
(iii) which is due directly and exclusively to natural causes and
(iv) which could not have been prevented by any amount of foresight, plans, and care.
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That would require some sort of cartel-like behaviour, wouldn't it? And maybe there might be some of that, implicitly, without the major players explicitly forming an illegal cartel...
Anyway, this reminds me of how the petrol stations around here say they have to sell of their buffer first, when they don't lower prices if the price of oil goes down, but when the price of oil goes up they don't seem to have any buffers.
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That's because most stations buy on consignment.when gas takes a steep dip, they still have to sell at the higher price. When gas goes up, they get a brief chance to pad the books until they have to buy the next tank. Here in the US most stations only make about 10-15 cents per gallon net profit. They don't have padding to cover credit card fees by percent, let alone the price changes. Service stations are MLM at its best... That's how the parent companies get rich.
Re:What a crock. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not going to happen.
Last I checked, there isn't much overlap for HD / SSD manufacturers. If HD prices remain high, SSD manufacturers will have the advantage.
Which means the HD manufacturers may go the way of the dinosaur in a few years.
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You do know that supply and demand is diagrammed with curves don't you? And since we live in a complex world where anything you make has a thousand inputs, the concept of leverage applies here: the other million dollars you spend on your server farm isn't worth much minus all the hard drives. Some people are
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No, this is the traditional Christmas period.
Prices are artificially inflated at that time of the year, probably to drive sales on SSD.
It's similar on other products.
Prices will decrease after Christmas.
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Well, I'm lazy too...
So, in the same spirit, I won't bother with a reference.
The motor spindle component manufacturing for hard drives has been almost 100% wiped out.
And, when the floods are under control, it will be time for another monsoon season.
It really doesn't look good -- prices on hard drives are going up, and up, and are staying there for (my guess) two to three years.
It really is time to look at SSDs.
SSD's will be more attractive now (Score:5, Interesting)
One advantage of all of this is that SSD drives will start to look more attractive price wise. To me, this is a good thing as people start purchasing SSDs the price will start coming down as the cost of components get more commoditised. I would not mind seeing spindle hard drives being a relic of the past.
Re:SSD's will be more attractive now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not if the price for SSDs keep dropping.
Once prices for 1 TB SSDs drop to something nice, HD will be shown the door.
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Once prices for 1 TB SSDs drop to something nice, HD will be shown the door.
For most people who don't play games and don't store big video files, current sub-$100 SSDs are good enough; 40-60GB will store the OS and office apps and some documents and pictures. For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.
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Agreed. Which is why we buy multiple 1 TB drives. :-)
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Slightly more than 4 TB here, with a brand new 240 GB SSD patiently waiting for me in the UPS sorting facility several miles from my home...which I will be breaking into later on tonight to get.
UPS takes one day off for Christmas, but two days for Thanksgiving (giving them a four day weekend). Now, I am all for lengthy vacations, but my current 128GB SSD is down to 6 GB of free space, and that's a fair chance that won't last the weekend...
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http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/resources/ship/imp_exp/operation.html
UPS 2011 Holiday Schedule
In the United States, UPS observes the following holidays:
Memorial Day - May 30, 2011*
Independence Day - July 4, 2011*
Labor Day - September 5, 2011*
Thanksgiving Day - November 24, 2011*
Day after Thanksgiving - November 25, 2011**
Christmas (observed) - December 26, 2011*
New Year's Day (observed) - January 2, 2012*
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But what am I supposed to sync my 64GB iPad to?
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Not until we get that whole "exactly how reliable are SSDs and what is their failure mode" thing worked out, they wont. They will get a lot more popular, but Im keeping my non-IO-bound servers on mechanical drives until we get that figured out. Right now there seems to be way too much uncertainty.
At least with a mechanical drive you have some indication (SMART, bad sectors, slowing motor) that its about to die, and you have some reasonable expectation that it could last 5+ years; the same is not true of S
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A combination of the Thailand floods, Black Friday sales, and mail-in rebates created a bizarre situation today... A class of SSDs dropped lower in price per-gig than a class of traditional HDDs...
15K RPM SAS drives aren't cheap, and since the flood, they're over $1 per gig. NewEgg was charging ~$1.44 per gig or more last I checked, for the Cheetah models.
Today, NCIX had Intel 320 SSDs on sale with MIR bringing the 80, 120, and 160GB models down to slightly under $1 per GB after MIR...
Yes, it's comparing th
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It's getting there, sure, but not quite. SSDs are coming down in costs, but you can't price consumer SSDs based on giant MIRs and black friday sales when you're really in need of enterprise-grade SSDs ;)
But yeah, it's getting closer and closer. Linode uses nothing but 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID10, I figure eventually they'll probably start moving towards SSDs if they don't decide to go SATA.
Throwing dirt cheap SATA drives (well, dirt cheap before the flood) onto SAS controllers is exactly what I do on my ho
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The short-term answer is you can't replace them all just yet. You'll have to scour Pricewatch and other sites to find HDs at sane prices.
The long-term answer is that you will never have enough space for video.
Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the reverse situation to a new product hitting the market. When LCDs or Plasma screens first came out, they were basically unaffordable by anybody except the richest people and companies, now everybody has one.
This is the same situation in reverse - the production capacity fell and the demand needs to recalibrate the prices.
Of-course don't forget that there is a fixed cost associated with rebuilding the factories and all the new equipment and tools now are more expensive, given so few harddrive manufacturers even exist and all of the inflation that's rampant in the world.
If the price holds, it sends a message to rebuild the production and maybe add even more, clearly there is unfulfilled demand at lower prices.
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no reason to rebuild. The HD market is under assault from the SSD market; hence, investing in HD manufacturing is seen as a losing proposition.
The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.
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Could china's stranglehold on rare earths have prompted any of the present price increases?
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Could it have increased the price? Probably.
Could it have increased the price by this much? Unlikely.
Hard drives use, to the best of my knowledge, only a small amount of rare-earths (I believe the magnets are typically Neodymium). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet
Perhaps a better way of saying this is, the introduction and competition from hybrid vehicles (which use Nd) should have had a more profound impact on the market than a more limited supply from China; have hybrid vehicle prices tripled?
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Hmm. Do you have a link to this problem?
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
It was lost when the database reached 200.1 GB.
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The what?
Here in Germany (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here in Germany (Score:4, Informative)
Based on your numbers, prices are up 220%, not 300%. If something costs 3x what it used to, that's a 200% increase, not a 300% increase.
What is this "average" you speak of? (Score:4, Insightful)
hard drive prices (lowest average unit prices) have rocketed 151% from October 1 to November 14th... The number varies when you break it down to individual drives, but it seems to be in the right ballpark.
(emphasis mine)
Yes, I'm glad we have rediscovered what it means to find an "average". [facepalm]
Would not be surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Price fixing is nothing new in the manufacturing world. I would not be surprised one bit. In my case, I've made a very simple and rash decision: I'm not buying any hard drives until prices come back down to normal. A SAS expander I built two months ago for $15k would now cost $30k. My clients aren't going for that, so I'm waiting it out.
The manufacturers knew what they were getting into, when they built their factories on flood plains. The burden for that mistake should not be born by the customer.
Re:Would not be surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally someone who isn't an economic ignoramus in 0123456.
As for billcopc's comment that those who built their factories on flood plains should bear the cost, it is incredible to me that he thinks they aren't bearing a cost for the destruction of their factories and property. Also, they obviously built their factories there for a reason, undoubtedly having to do with costs; consumers have been reaping the benefits of that in lower prices.
Re:Would not be surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Lefties prefer option 1, where they keep prices artificially low and then complain when there's nothing available to buy. Sane people prefer option 2.
I was with you up until that gem. Your economic statement is sound, but your generalization falls somewhere short of enlightened thought.
I don't hate gay people and think abstinence-only education is a terrible idea. That typically makes me one of the "lefties." Believe it or not, I still own and operate a successful small business and am supportive of the free market in most contexts.
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It is interesting that you contrast "lefties" with "sane people" when the option you associate with said sane people is planned economy.
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How is "allow the prices to rise to market-clearing levels" a "planned economy"? The other option was, "Fix the price by legislation and put up with the shortages."
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Maybe if you had bothered to read the whole post you'd see I don't agree with that part, but reading three lines in a row is hard, right? You might get dizzy.
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Just out of curiosity, I wonder how much it would cost to build a concrete sea-wall with a ramp around the factory.
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Who, in their right mind, builds a factory without excess capacity to trounce the competition in a moment of weakness?
That's just poor planning...
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The main reason is because of the floods at WD, the only major supplier of heads is Seagate in Derry. They are pushing up their prices to the makers because they can because demand is higher on them. A temporary blip because WD will be back up and running soon (i.e. by the end of 2012). Still, SSD's don't have the reliability nor will the increased price of HDD's scare people off, SSD's are still expensive.
Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"? (Score:5, Informative)
Or by March 2012, tops. [nationmultimedia.com]
Personally, I'd rather take the estimates of people doing their best to fix the problem... [marketwatch.com]
Plant managers at Nidec Corp. (6594), which makes motors for disk drives and also has a factory at Rajana, decided not to wait for the water to subside at its seven flooded factories. According to company spokesman Masashiro Nagayasu, they cut a hole in the roof of the Rajana factory, sent divers into the toxin-laden waters to unbolt some heavy equipment, and lifted it onto waiting boats. Some of the equipment is now being used in Nidec factories in China and the Philippines.
...than of CEOs like Seagate's Stephen Luczo [bloomberg.com] who are gleefully rubbing their hands together at the price hike, predicting a year-long shortage of hard-drives.
"People are going to appreciate the complexity of this business," he says.
Re:Surely you mean "by the end of 2011"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Jesus Christ. If that ain't the gold-standard of examples for why american business is fucked I don't know what is - productivity vs rent-seeking.
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Yes we should force our employees to swim through toxic water so that production doesn't slip this quarter. THAT is the kind of society that we should be trying to create. Hopefully the west can work smarter, and not just more dangerously as you seem to be advocating.
Im sure they have wonderful medical plans to deal with the employee getting sick as well.
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Yes we should force our employees to swim through toxic water so that production doesn't slip this quarter.
Get a grip. It's called a drysuit.
Only 150%? (Score:3, Informative)
As a Seagate reseller in Canada, our cost on the most popular model we sell is up 191% (roughly triple). Seagate didn't even have a factory in the flood. WD (who did) is typically even higher, and many models simply can't be bought anywhere for any price.
Even a blind squirrel./. (Score:2)
For once I am on the right side of a price change. The $99 with free shipping I got is looking pretty good now.
Welcome to capitalism... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is any of this surprising??? A caribou in Alaska passes gas and ALL gas prices jump forty cents in the US (of course there's no price fixing or collusion going on.) In 2000 Enron screwed with the supply of electricity to the western US, precipitating the Dot Com crash (the tech bubble sustained the collapse, but it was the rolling black outs that started massive business failures.) Enron's affiliates were able to bump prices to mind numbing levels, then got caught with internal memos laughing about how they reamed California for billions. An article comes out that oat bran reduces cholesterol and suddenly a bag of granola needs to be stored in a bank deposit box.
We are haunted daily by "Whatever the market will bear..." [rhdefense.com], which is just code for "The piggies are at the trough and if I don't gouge out a piece for myself I'll miss out on the feeding frenzy." Sadly it has become the norm. Our society has put profit ahead of everything, ahead of dignity, compassion, even sanity. We've been caught in a terrible race to the bottom. This is why we debate about the sane limits to gutting economies and ecosystems. Because somebody, somewhere isn't yet done raping what remains of some vital resource.
Perhaps its time we acknowledged the darker aspects of primate behavior and started designing our society to limit the damage they can do. Checks and balances were expressly designed into our government to limit the dangers of concentrated power. Sadly we've allowed power to concentrate elsewhere and the wisdom of our founding fathers now ring louder than ever before. Corporation is the failure and its time to put things right. The price of drives is just a blip on a landscape of unbridled greed and avarice destroying the very things that make life worth living.
Damn straight they are up (Score:2)
Best Buy Canada I bought a Seagate Expansion 500G for $69.99 about three months ago. Its $99 now., the 1TB was $99 and now is $139.99
Did anyone notice? No Hard Drives in Sales Adverts (Score:3)
Something I noticed for the last three weeks was the absence of hard drives specials or sales in the weekly adverts from retailers like Fry's electronics.
When newegg sent out their "November Madness" and "Black Friday" emails to subscribes, there was *not a single* hard drive to be found in the sales.
Normally I'd try for a witty or insightful comment here, but I just don't have much more to say as I don't know if it more due to profit taking on the retailer's part, or if they are more concerned about running short/out of supply in the near future.
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Me thinks it's a combination of a number of factors, resulting in a 'perfect storm.'
Western currencies aren't doing so hot compared to Eastern currencies. That hurts.
China has cut back on exporting of rare-earths. That hurts.
Gas prices have probably increased the demand for hybrid vehicles, which use Nd, a typical element also used by HD manufacturers. More competition for limited resources. That probably doesn't help.
Floods have occurred in Thailand, knocking out 25% of the manufacturing capacity for HDs.
clearance windfalls (Score:2)
3TB drive (Score:2)
Don't hold your breath... (Score:4, Informative)
- Western digital (which just got the greenlight to acquire the Hitatchi HDD division)
- Seagate (which took took over the samsung HDD division)
- Toshiba (which only makes 2.5" HDDs)
The only real pressure to drop prices again would come from competition with SSDs, and those can't compete at all in in TB-range
Now, if you are in the market for a new HDD, your current best bet is to look at the brick and mortar department stores: Much of their remaining on-the-shelf stock hasn't caught up to the rapidly raises prices yet, which currently makes them a lot cheaper than online vendors... Provided you can still find them. Earlier today I saw a bunch of 1.5TB western digital elements drives on the shelf in Target for $79, while Amazon.com wants $129 for the same drive. 2TB for $89, instead of $159. But with the christmas shopping season starting, I'm sure that the department stores will run out of their cheap stock pretty soon.
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Wait. Is it legal to sell 5900 RPM HDs? ^_^
Re:seagate 2TB 5900rpm (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only is it quite legal, I (and many others) swear by WD's "Green" hard drives. They're at least as fast as my previous 7200RPM hard drive, and run damn near silent, and very, very cool, even without any attmept to cool them. Unlike Seagate drives, WD HDDs also support acoustic noise management, dropping the already damn quite drives down another few decibles.
They're not just perfect for DVRs, either. If your primary drive is an SSD, you likelydon't need crazy seek time on your secondary bulk storage, and low power, longevity, and nearly no noise is a great feature.
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Oh baby, I CAN tell the difference. Every time I sit down to fix someone's machine, it takes all of several moments to realize that the machine has a 'value' hard drive in it. I don't even need to crack the case to take a look at it. I just hit the power button, and wait more than a minute for the OS to get to a logon screen. In a machine with a dual-core processor and 4 GBs of ram.
If I have time to check the specs on your machine while the OS is booting, I can almost guarantee that it has a 'value' hard dr
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Mmmmmmm. I'm thinking not even for the media server. If you want to run bit torrent on it, and be able to stream movies, 7200 RPMs barely cut it.
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Yeah, and instead of paying +150% for months, we could pay +300% always.
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Parent is a troll, but I'll answer this anyway (I'm bored).
Maybe you dumb US fuckers will stop shipping all your manufacturing away. -> Perhaps, when other countries stop bending over backwards to get jobs for their people. Simply put, their country wants these jobs more than ours do.
Why are these not manufactured in the US? -> Because, in all likelihood, it's cost prohibitive.
Why does the destruction of one plant cause this much harm? -> Because it accounted for 25% of the market. That's actually
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If we made it here we couldn't afford it.
The reason we have such vast numbers of PCs is the components are made in places like Thailand.
A trivial price increase now and then doesn't matter.
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Tell the truth, that's a bit of a lie though. Those people in those factories are paid nearly US wages, more so if you compensate for them wasting manpower 2-3x what US companies do.
The bigger issue is investment dollars. They got to build these plant for pennies on the dollar with little to no oversight and the governments picking up a huge part of the tab. It was about investors chasing that quick 20% turnaround. Of course now the money-losing part of the industry is moved so its cheaper to build where fa
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Depending on the buyer, the exact 'floor size' that they absolutely won't go below varies(80 or 160GB seems pretty common); but the buyer's interest in more space than that is zero. They'll take it, if it's free; but they won't pay any extra.
This makes for a very large number of HDD sales where an HDD is absolutely required(can't ship the box without a boot
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My floor size is as the size of the last, largest hard drive I purchased.
Which means if they aren't selling 1.5 TB hard drives, I am not interested. What I am interested in is 2 TB or 3 TB hard drives -> 3 of them, to be exact, just for my home machine. 6 of them, if they are inexpensive enough.
But at today's prices and capacities, hell no. I have older drives (that I replaced with those 1.5 TB drives with) that are equal to what they want to sell me today. If I am feeling particularly desperate for a 50
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There is no such thing as artificial price fixing.
If there's a limited number of suppliers in a market, they can (and do, often) collude to keep prices at a certain level. It's perfectly natural to call that "artificial price fixing". In a perfect market, they would be replaced by a competitor whose price was closer to the marginal cost of production - but that's not how actually economies work.
I suppose to an extent, your interpretation IS what's taught in Econ 101 (assuming Econ 101 is "General Microeconomics" at your school, and focuses on theory), bu
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Considering they have been moving to SSD for a while they might end up being cheaper .... I mean more profitable...
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Just about everybody it seems :(