Higher Hard Drive Prices Are the New Normal 268
An anonymous reader tips an article looking at the state of HDD pricing now that the market has had time to recover from the flooding in Thailand and a round of consolidation among manufacturers. Prices have certainly declined from the high they reached during the flooding, but they've stabilized a bit higher than they were beforehand. Quoting:
"Are things going to change any time soon? We doubt it. WD and Seagate both reported record profits this past quarter. In Q1 2011, Western Digital reported net profit of $146M against sales of $2.3B while Seagate recorded $2.7B in revenue and $93 million in net income. That’s a net profit margin of 6% and 3%, respectively. For this past quarter, Western Digital reported sales of $3B (thanks in part to its acquisition of Hitachi) and a net income of $483 million, while Seagate hit $4.4B in revenue and $1.1B in profits. Net margin was 16% and 37% respectively. With profit margins like this, the hard drive manufacturers are going to be loath to cut prices. After years of barely making profits, the Thailand floods are the best excuse ever to drive record income for a few quarters. All of this means that while we expect prices to gradually decline, holding off on a necessary purchase doesn’t make much sense."
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean, companies will collude together in order to raise the price of goods in that market?
When there are only two or three competitors in a market, actual collusion is no longer necessary. They simply have an unwritten and unspoken agreement to keep prices where they are. Neither WD nor Seagate has anything to gain by cutting prices that they know their (only) competitor will match.
Regulators should have never allowed the Hitachi acquisition to happen. The HDD industry was already over consolidated.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to extend the argument, Game Theory suggests that there are 2 stables states when you get down to 2 or 3 big players. Either cozy (Biggest firm is the price leader, everybody follows suit. Nobody wants a war) or fierce - no quarter is given by either side.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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On top of this, add the fact that what the consumer wants may or may not be the most profitable product, and may or may not be what's actua
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
SSDs actually make some sense here, because they use less power, and because they have a limited number of write cycles. A media library isn't written to very often, usually just once for any location, and then it's mainly read-only after that. The main downside, of course, is that at the moment, SSD has a significantly higher cost-per-byte than rotational storage. If the cost-per-byte were the same, even if the speed weren't any better, it'd probably make a lot more sense to use SSD for your media library.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The HDD industry was already over consolidated.
Really, Really? The previous margins were tiny; the current margins are thin. I like low prices, too, but I also like companies that produce quality products to stay in business...
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's totally false. Intel would be trying to sell you an Itanic chip for 64-bit applications.
Remember, at the time, Itanic was what Intel was pitching to anyone talking about 64-bit.
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Duh, duh? Aside from keeping prices higher than they were before the flood, there's also the fact that Segate felt comfortable enough in their marketshare to drop their five year warranty on drives. Like Verizon adding a $30 "upgrade" fee, that should be telling you something about the competitive state of a market.
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Ummm ... isn't that what collusion means??
If they have any form of agreement to keep the prices high, I kind of thought that was, by definition, collusion.
Now, it's possible they've all independently decided to leave prices high until the other guys drop them (which might be what you were getting at), but then there's not "agreem
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Ummm ... isn't that what collusion means
No, to collude, they would need to communicate in some form, written or spoken. Just guessing that the other party thinks like you and acting on that assumption is NOT collusion.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
your annual profit is $483 million. it's going to cost you about that much to build a new plant so you can sell your product cheaper and get your profit down to $200 million
these decisions aren't rocket science. i bet your're not running a business
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And? That doesn't mean they're legal, it just means our antitrust people are busy dealing with bigger fish to fry. In the meantime, we all lose by paying ridiculous prices. It's no different than any other big business collusion - the company gains, the customer loses.
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how is it illegal? there is no democratic government that can force you to invest in something that won't return any profits
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it illegal for a company to take what customers are willing to pay?
How is it illegal for companies to simply not lower prices... without colluding with each other?
Since when are profit margins required to be low?
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How is it illegal for a company to take what customers are willing to pay?
How is it illegal for companies to simply not lower prices... without colluding with each other?
Since when are profit margins required to be low?
it's illegal if they've as much as nodded in each others direction to keep to current pricing level.
the simple reason why the prices are high is that during the hd manufacturing troubles they realised that people will buy the same amount of hdd's even if the cost stays the same.
(anyhow.. I think 2.5" pricing has gone down).
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We're talking about profit margins of 6% and 3% respectively here. At those levels, it's absurd to argue that the products are over-priced (unless great heaping piles of profit are being added further down the channel).
Hard drive pricing isn't about collusion, it's about commodification: there's essentially no difference between the products that competitors sell, so they got into a race to the bottom in terms of their profits in the hopes of capturing larger market share. Now each company is backing off a
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But ... but ... Free Market(tm)!!1
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Preferably by ending behavior that causes sarcastic shock.
New solid state storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage (and existing flash-based SSDs) will be replaced within 2 years by memristor-based storage or similar non-rotational, non-flash storage. It makes no sense for hard drive manufacturers to "race to the bottom" when they've already consolidated into 2 major manufacturers and sales have such a short term outlook.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Haven't they been saying that for a few decades now? Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media. Some markets, such as laptops and workstations which value speed over capacity, will likely transition to SSDs being the norm within the next 5 years or so, but when you need a lot of storage you'll still turn to hard drives for at least another decade or two. Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
Given the rapid decline in the number of write cycles at smaller process sizes, that may never happen with current flash technology.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:4, Informative)
This is a "transistors are crappy now vs vacuum tubes working great" argument.
No, it's a 'flash is running into fundamental laws of physics' argument.
I suspect another SSD technology will come along to replace it, but flash probably can't go much further unless you add a large oversupply of cells to replace those which die.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:4, Interesting)
That's what technology like PCM [wikipedia.org] is for. As you shrink the lithography, PCM purportedly gains in reliability due to the reduced amount of material needed to actually store the bit.
That and, unlike memristors, you can actually buy PCM now [digikey.com], and while the price per MB is still quite high... it exists in volume and isn't vaporware, which memristors by and large still are.
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This is a "transistors are crappy now vs vacuum tubes working great" argument.
No, it's a 'flash is running into fundamental laws of physics' argument.
I suspect another SSD technology will come along to replace it, but flash probably can't go much further unless you add a large oversupply of cells to replace those which die.
I don't think so. I think that eventually, people will stop buying storage all together, and just put their data in the cloud.
pff...
BA HA HA HA HA HA!
Oh, shit. I'm sorry. I tried to say it with a straight face. I really did. But I just can't do it.
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"Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media."
You mean like the currently-planned 1TB SDXC card format? Take that stuff, make a 2.5" drive, you could dump 16TB into a tiny piece of plastic, epoxy, and silicon.
Rotational media is only going to stick around because it's CHEAP.
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Rotational media is only going to stick around because it's CHEAP.
Well, duh.
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"Rotational media is only going to stick around because it's CHEAP."
Is there any other reason for technology to stick around when it competes with other technology?
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Yeah... and they also recently announced hard drives that could be as big as 60PB (yes, PB, not TB) within 4 years. A bit more of a jump over current hard drives than your mentioned SDXC is over current solid state capacity.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:4, Informative)
Haven't they been saying that for a few decades now? Rotational media will be around for a long time to come, barring any real shattering breakthroughs in solid state media. Some markets, such as laptops and workstations which value speed over capacity, will likely transition to SSDs being the norm within the next 5 years or so, but when you need a lot of storage you'll still turn to hard drives for at least another decade or two. Given that hard drive technology is still having breakthroughs, it will be some time before SSDs can catch up in overall capacity, nevermind price per GB/TB.
SSDs have already surpassed hard drives in capacity, with 16TB being offered on a single SSD. [guru3d.com] SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte. [newegg.com] True, much more than hard drives, but 11 years ago when hard drives were $3 a gigabyte [xlr8yourmac.com] and 7 years ago hard drives were 50 cents/gb. [silentpcreview.com] Now hard drives are less than 1 cent a gigabyte, so how long do you think it will take SSDs to get there?
SSDs have the huge advantage that everyone wants them. Every device needs fast access and transfer rates with low power usage in as small a space as possible. More devices means more sales means lower prices as they ramp up production. I have a feeling that by the end of 2012 people won't even be considering a hard drive in a PC anymore, everyone will just buy SSDs.
Hard drives will never win the capacity war, not when they can currently put 64 gigabytes on a space smaller than your fingernail [newegg.com] and that includes the memory controller and case.
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You may want to check your math... at $0.01/GB, a 1TB drive would be $10... and I'm still not seeing them cheaper than $70 on sale. Most of them are around 6 to 12 cents per gig.
I really don't see the cost of SSD's dropping to 1/10th of their current price (the price point at which they're comparable to hard disks) in 7 months. 7 years is much more likely when you consider hard drives are also getting larger and cheaper at the same time. Oh, there's also the fact that cheaper SSDs still seem to have a relat
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You may want to check your math... at $0.01/GB, a 1TB drive would be $10... and I'm still not seeing them cheaper than $70 on sale.
You're right, meant less than 10 cent/GB.
I really don't see the cost of SSD's dropping to 1/10th of their current price (the price point at which they're comparable to hard disks) in 7 months. 7 years is much more likely when you consider hard drives are also getting larger and cheaper at the same time.
Very few people need 4TB, the current largest hard drive. I'd argue most people are happy with 500gb. With SSDs less than $1/gb now, down from $4/gb just 2 years ago [anandtech.com], 500gb SSDs will be somewhere south of $200 by the end of 2012 or early 2013. You can already buy a 240gb SSD for $190. [newegg.com]
Oh, there's also the fact that cheaper SSDs still seem to have a relatively poor MTBF and don't deliver the performance gains that most people associate with SSDs... have to pay a bit more for a *good* SSD
That's not really a fact though, that "cheap PC hardware price = poor performance and poor MTBF", that's your opinion.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:4, Interesting)
Where HAVE I heard this before?
Oh, yeah, now I remember!
Me: We should go ahead and buy the 85MB HD for the new comp - we'd fill up a 40MB too fast..
the Wife: No, it'll be YEARS before we could fill up 40MB - why pay the extra couple hundred for space we'll never use?
We had a similar discussion a few years later, with the players swapped, when we were debating 300MB and 500 MB.
And again when we debated 2GB v. 3GB.
And 20GB v 50GB
And 500GB and 1TB....
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They value ENERGY EFFICIENCY over everything. If you come out with a SSD technology that uses 20% less energy, but runs at 1/4th the capacity of our current SSDs, it will find itself in almost every laptop.
My laptop consumes around 20W for normal desktop use. The HDD is rated at something like 1.5W. Cutting 20% off that 1.5W will have a negligible impact on battery life.
Meanwhile the 750GB drive can't hold all my Steam games so I'm going to have to stick a 1TB in there soon.
Oh, and we put an SSD into the netbook because we regularly boot it up, do some stuff and shut it down again so knocking 60-70% off the boot time was a good investment.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but we're neglecting the rest of the system. While the laptop hard drive is busy loading data, the rest of the system is consuming 20W. If it takes a minute grinding away to do something (and you're waiting for it), that's 20W-m of energy used up. If a more efficient SSD cuts it down to 20 seconds, that's 6W-m, and you get to do your stuff sooner. Win-win - laptop consumes less energy while waiting o nthe hard drive, user gets going faster.
Basically, individual component battery life measurements aren't as relevant as whole system power measurement.
It's just like the old Tom's Hardware report that SSDs consume more CPU, when in reality it's because the SSD is returning data faster so the CPU is busier giving it new I/O to do.
Hell, an SSD can give an older system new life - I have an old work laptop with a core2duo ("Vista Ready" to give you its age) in it. Replaced its hard drive with an SSD (from 160GB down to 120GB), damn laptop super-snappy and responsive.
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"They value ENERGY EFFICIENCY over everything."
Is that why most laptops have fans to conduct away the heat energy that they are wasting?
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Laptops value capacity over anything else because that's the easiest to market.
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In three years, 128GB will just about be enough to install Windows and a couple of new games.
Re:New solid state storage (Score:5, Insightful)
Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage ... will be replaced within 2 years ...
Most articles I read during the 1980s said the same thing.
Ya well there's some new evidence (Score:5, Informative)
It's called the "SSD" section on Newegg. You are right that head-in-the-clouds type tech people have been saying that magnetic media will get replaced, but it has just been wishful thinking. However now it is. SSDs sell quite readily. They aren't going to displace HDDs tomorrow or anything, and I'd say that 2 year timeline is a bit optimistic, but they are already making big in roads.
While they don't compete in terms of storage/$ they are getting to the point where they are cheap enough for enough storage that people find them worthwhile. That's all it really takes. Few people actually need 2TB of storage, the idea that SSDs have to be dead equal to HDDs is silly. Many people will decide they can get on just fine with 160GB and would rather have the speed.
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Few people actually need 2TB of storage
The unfortunate side effect is that we're going to lose the economies of scale involved in producing these drives. Expect the home file server to disappear into the cloud.
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Yeah, they don't have to compete on a $/GB basis against magnetic HDs in all sectors. Once they got cheap enough for big enough (
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Except this time it's actually happening. When is that last time you saw someone using an mp3 player with a spinning disc?
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Really, "most articles" in the 80's? Hyperbole or bullshit; you decide!
I'm pretty sure every mass-market article I read mentioning bubble memory in the 80s said that it was going to replace rotational storage in a few years.
Whatever happened to bubble memory anyway?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory/ [wikipedia.org]
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its already happening, people are buying smartphones and ipads. even my wife's macbook rarely gets used. she's always on her iphone.
the computer is mostly a paperweight at home that i turn on once a month to copy photos from my iphone
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This doesn't say anything at all - just because you and your wife don't use computers doesn't mean that the rest of the world will stop using computers. As adorable as the ipad is, it is a computer replacement only for people who don't use computers. It's great for media consumption, but an ipad is not a computer.
I have an ipad. I am not much of a media consumer: I don't like watching movies on a tablet, I don't subscribe to magazines, I don't read digital books and I'm not too big on facebook/twitter scen
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We wan't more storage - and the more storage we get the more we want. SSDs just can't get on the right growth curve - the price/size ratio for SSDs just doesn't scale. Look at the class of "mobile" devices (phones, tablets etc.) - they are topping out for onboard starage at numbers that are pretty poor in a modern context - and the sizes aren't growing. You don't see
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We want more storage
Speak for yourself ; for my work, which has some fairly heavy data sets, I muddle through on a 64GB SSD. I'm tempted to upgrade to a 128GB model, because it's sometimes a bit tight and I'd like to have room for my music collection (12GB).
Games ; I currently have a 1TB partition devoted to game installs. It's not remotely full yet.
Video : this is the biggie. My HTPC currently has 1TB of storage as well. Paradoxically, I think it would probably be better if it had less storage - we just tend to accumulate a h
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The people who do need all this storage, I'm sad to say, are probably torrenting a lot, because that's the only way a consumer accumulates that much data that they don't have a read-only media copy of already.
I have 4TB of video storage on my MythTV box because my girlfriend complains if it's deleted the CSI episode she didn't watch from six months ago.
Usage expands to fill the available space.
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Seagate was saying (that is, it's vapour) they might have 60 TB disks by 2016. Not now.
At the moment I have a 256 GB SSD in my notebook, along side a 512 GB hard drive. Guess which one is being used at the moment? With more people streaming things, the average person's need for storage is probably not going to grow at anything like it used to. Once that happens, capacity becomes a secondary concern, and the speed of SSDs make them very attractive.
SSDs aren't going to kill of hard drives entirely, but th
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Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage (and existing flash-based SSDs) will be replaced within 2 years by memristor-based storage or similar non-rotational, non-flash storage. It makes no sense for hard drive manufacturers to "race to the bottom" when they've already consolidated into 2 major manufacturers and sales have such a short term outlook.
Disk drives may be replaced, but they won't be going anywhere. What we are starting to see is SSDs replacing HDDs as the primary, boot, OS and application drive. HDD's are kept around for mass storage for photos, videos, music, documents, and even some larger applications. I see HDDs replacing tape drives in the future for readily accessible backups.
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Most articles I've seen indicate that rotational storage (and existing flash-based SSDs) will be replaced within 2 years by memristor-based storage or similar non-rotational, non-flash storage. It makes no sense for hard drive manufacturers to "race to the bottom" when they've already consolidated into 2 major manufacturers and sales have such a short term outlook.
This. Hard drives are dead. SSDs are less than $1 a gigabyte. [newegg.com] Down from $4 a gigabyte just 2 years ago. [anandtech.com] At the rate SSDs are dropping in price why even consider a hard drive when you can buy now for $1/gb or wait a few months until it's 50 cents/gb or another year until it's 10 cents/gb? Few hundred gigabytes is more than enough for the average user.
Good-bye rotational media, I will not miss your slow access times.
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And HDDs are $150 for 3,000GB.
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I'd love to see HDDs getti
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Such as? What technology do you realistically expect to provide similar capacities to spinning discs for similar prices in 2 years?
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You say this hot on the heels of the report of 60TB HDDs by 2016 [slashdot.org].
HDDs aren't going anywhere. I think the near-term future is hybrid systems like Intel's Smart Response becoming more advanced and commonplace--moving the files (and/or entire operating system) that you actually use onto the SSD while keeping the big stuff on the HDD.
collusion? (Score:2)
I haven't been keeping up on this subject the last couple of months, but I was under the impression that the operations at the drive manufacturing plants were going to return to normal sooner rather than later. I would think that would cause prices to drop, even with the consolidation of the vendors. Otherwise, I'd suspect price-fixing.
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Price fixing? YA THINK?
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This is all reminiscent of the Sumitomo event in the early 90s... when RAM prices tripled overnight. Forget the fact that there was a 6 month stockpile at the plant of the epoxy resin they could not produce until the plant was rebuilt... forget the fact that the manufacturers also had their own months-to-years supplies of the resin, and that the resin was a small fraction of the cost of RAM... prices TRIPLED OVERNIGHT. RAM manufacturers took their sweet time getting back to normal pricing, even though the f
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It's no different than how the price of crude oil makes gasoline prices spike: the oil being sold on the market is 6 months away from being turned into gasoline, yet one always follows the other. It's profiteering, plain and simple. No price-fixing conspiracy needed!
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The "sweet spot" will always be $200 for these drives in the consumer market, which drives down the price of those 2TB drives considerably (back down to pre-flood prices).
Speak for yourself. The sweet spot for me has always been around $125. Of course, I learned long ago that finding the sweet spot, within a hard-drive category (i.e. 7200 RPM drives), is a matter of dividing the price by the amount of space and buying the drive that gives you the most bang for your buck. This works for memory as well.
Of course, my setup is not common as I run a RAID-5 array, plus spare, on my desktop system, so I can make use of cheap disks and add storage space as the "sweet spot" moves
It doesn't work that way (Score:2, Insightful)
This really is Economics 101. The maximum profit margin comes at the point where the supply curve and the demand curve meet. Raising prices above that point results in fewer sales and therefore less profit. Companies won't stop following this rule just because they have an "excuse" for raising prices. Partly because they didn't need an excuse in the first place, but mostly because they still have to compete with other companies.
Re:It doesn't work that way (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe you should have stuck around for Economics 102.
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Maybe you should have stuck around for Economics 102.
This is the part where everyone learns about nVidia and ATI colluding to set videocard prices right?
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Maybe you should have stuck around for Economics 102.
If Econ 102 contradicts Econ 101, then someone messed up. At worst, the rules taught in 101 may not hold in all cases—but the boundaries should have been part of the 101 curriculum.
Anyway, the concept of supply vs. demand and the optimal price-point are fundamental to all levels of economics. There is nothing wrong with what the GP wrote. The part which was omitted, however, is that the "excuse" of rising costs pushes out the marginal producers, reducing the supply and thus raising the optimal price-p
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If your basic physics classes didn't at least mention that the Newtonian formulas are only approximations, and not valid for very small dimensions or very high energies, then you should probably ask for your money back. Similarly for qualifiers about static situations and ideal materials. For the problem domain those basic science classes are concerned with, the approximate formulas are perfectly valid. The higher-level classes require different formulas only because they have an expanded problem domain. Si
It kind of does. (Score:3, Informative)
In a perfectly competitive market with elastic supply and demand and where there are completely rational and well-informed consumers and producers, yes, your description of the market works.
The problem is, this is a case where there are only two major suppliers, demand is relatively inelastic, and the vast majority of consumers have no idea what a hard drive costs to make. In other words, what you're seeing is more like monopoly utility pricing - and that means that as long as higher prices can be reasonab
Fundamental problem with economics (Score:3)
Companies are run by people. People are NOT rational. Alan Greenspan cited this as a problem, although IMHO Greenspan's bigger problem was to accept that corporations are people and then to assume that they were rational.
Rational actors maximizing profit is theory. Reality is insane people "managing" things into oblivion. If the HDD manufacturers try to squeeze the market to the point where solid state displaces HDD everywhere, and they fail to extract maximum profit because they are greedy, that will n
HIGHER DEMAND = HIGHER PRICES (Score:2, Informative)
Reality is not going to change, and all you do by trying to fight it (i.e. by demanding the government intervene and impose price controls) is destroy the companies whose products you enjoy and depend on.
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Just reviewed prices online - what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like the 2TB desktop (ie, 3.5") disk is about $110. That's not so bad, considering I bought one for $95 about a year ago, before the floods. A 3TB is $160, about the same as last year from my recollection.
Of course, if you're buying 4x (say to build or replace a NAS), then you do see a noticeable cost difference, but it's not even 25% more.
A 16% (or even 37%) margin is does not indicate windfall profits or ludicrous extortion.
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Maybe one year ago isn't such a good benchmark. Less than one year ago prices here were 5x EUR for 2TB (that is between 50 and 60 eur). I'm talking good retailers, both online and brick mortar stores.
Even after the flood (but not until the retailers got wind of the shortage) USB 2TB drives were going for 59EUR.
Now the cheapest bare 2 TB drive I can find is 110 EUR. Something from a reputable retailer like amazon is 120-150.
WD20EARS (entry-level WD 2TB) is on amazon marketplace (not amazon directly) between
Re:Just reviewed prices online - what's the big de (Score:5, Informative)
The big thing I see is that warranty lengths have dropped off to 3 years from 5 years on many of the high-grade models that are selling today. They still sell 5 year warranties, but at a premium. The real cheap ones have dropped to 1 year warranties. Are prices back to where they were before the floods? Almost. Is product quality back to where it was? Nope.
I'll be waiting a little longer until I build myself another RAID. I believe we still have another quarter or two before we see the prices hit their baseline. I've been extending my purchase time frame by doing some serious house cleaning.
Production != Availability (Score:2)
While WD production is more or less back to what it was, there is still a lot of pent up demand for drives because of the past 9 months of high prices. This demand is providing impetus to keep prices up.
In addition contracts with vendors were signed at higher prices during the shortages. These contracts have not expired yet, keeping prices higher than they were when the floods occurred.
Exxon, et. al.? (Score:2)
Quote by Dagny Taggart (Score:2)
"I expect to make a pile of money from the John Galt Line. I will have earned it."
Wait it out... (Score:2)
2 TB/$100 threshold (Score:2)
It's completely anecdotal, but I was waiting for the 2 TB/$100 threshold again, and that was finally broken a few weeks ago. I got one on a newegg sale. (Sure, it was via a $20 "rebate" but that was applied directly at the time of purchase.)
Bad math (Score:2)
$1.1B net profit on $4.4B is 25% net margin, not 37%. It's not even 37% markup, it's ~33.3% (due to rounding, the range could be 30.8%-35.9%).
My charts say otherwise (Score:3)
And by "my charts" I mean camelegg: http://camelegg.com/product/N82E16822152245 [camelegg.com]
The market spiked and it's slowly returning to normal. It hasn't bottomed. I think that the time required is a combination of rebuilding manufacturing capacity, backlogged demand slowly being filled, and simple price inertia.
Small difference (Score:3)
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So you left Seagate in favor of the manufacturer with even shittier quality drives? Not so smart.
Warranty periods are not the only t
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All of the drive manufacturers did this back in the very early 2000's, and then there was this huge collusion case against the entire lot of them. About fixing drive prices, and warranties. I have a feeling the same thing will happen again, just a feeling. Only because I see the similarities.
And pushing people to SSDs (Score:2)
WD and Seagate are morons in my opinion because neither have any kind of serious SSD lineup (both only have a couple enterprise parts, and I never see them mentioned on the list of companies to buy from). Higher HDD prices are just going to drive more people to SSDs as the SSD prices drop. It isn't a matter of competing on an equal dollar per GB amount, it is a matter of people close enough in absolute dollar terms.
So someone goes HDD shipping for a desktop, they find that it is somewhere in the $80-200 ran
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Why do profits come at a cost? Sure for the consumer but for the manufacturer? Lower warranties further increase profits. It's a win-win for them.
Because when I can't buy a new hard drive that's guaranteed to last more than 2 years I don't buy a new hard drive.
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I think in this case, given how low the profit margins are, buying up the competitors simply means that you can now sell enough hard drives at absurdly low prices to be able to make a living. If there were real collusion or natural monopoly effects, the prices would be going up from the post-flood levels, not down.
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To be fair, quality should go /up/ with the acquisitions so long as you buy drives that were made at the formerly Samsung/Hitachi plants. They didn't buy out those companies then raze all their manufacturing resources and there's no immediate reason to refit the plants and thus reduce reliability. Now, if five years down the line they're not maintaining the plants and they let tolerances slip that'd be a problem.
Granted, I am unsure how the floods affected individual plants, so if it's primarily the high
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Yeah, I recently bought four more so-called "Samsung" 2TB (I already have eight REAL Samsung 2TBs) quick, hoping to get some before the invevitable slide in quality got too bad. And it's GOING to happen. Seagate's corporate policies are going to gut QC and make manufacturing and redesign shortcuts. It's only a matter of time; probably not very much time. When my drives arrived, they had ST part numbers next to the old "HD204UI" designation - and they say "Made in China". I'm crossing my fingers. So far, so
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Yep, you do that untill some brandless chinese company appears and takes all your market from you.
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Not collusion, simple profiteering. One starts, the others follow.