Price of mechanical hard drives...

[Mobius1]

Is it me, or has the price of traditional mechanical hard drives shot up recently?

As an example April 2010 I purchased a Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA3 HDD with 64MB cache for £46.62+VAT. The same website no longer offers this but is selling a Caviar Blue (mid range compared to Black) 500GB drive with only 16MB cache and only SATA2 for £223 including VAT. Similarly another well known website has a WD Caviar Black 500GB for £111 + VAT which is 140GB less storage, same specs, more than double the price.

Correct me if I'm wrong and I know SSDs are becoming more popular, but what the hell is going on with these prices? Hard drive space was becoming dirt cheap if you didn't mind an old spinner drive, but now they seem extremely expensive for what they are? Something big must have happened for the prices to increase so drastically.

[ChuckFickens]

Well it might be something to do with the hard drive factories getting flooded in Thailand causing an expected 48million drive shortage!

http://www.channelreg...ve_prices_may_double/

[Mobius1]

Blimey, thanks for that link Chuck. Not well publicised that news is it? Perhaps this will act as the second nail in the coffin of old hard drives. For the next 9 months or so they're no longer going to retain such a healthy cost per GB advantage over solid state storage.

[ChuckFickens]

It's not well publicised because it won't really effect the "average" person directly.

You can be sure it's going to effect the entire computer market for some time though, prices of computers will go up overall. this is actually a really big thing but most people will see it's effect indirectly (I'm glad the 50TB of drives I needed to purchase for recent projects was just before it happened)

I agree though, it will give SSDs a boost in the desktop/laptop, but they are still not at the stage to compete on the bulk (SAN) storage level.

[rojash]

There's a lot of profiteering going on. One of our suppliers gives us access to their stock figures, and they've got around 1000 HDDs that have been in stock for a few months and have suddenly risen in wholesale price by around 90%.

[Mobius1]

Rojash - I considered the profiteering element to this as well. However, isn't it true that most wholesale and retailers stock maintenance works like that? If they bought 1000 HDDs at a much lower price and sell them for the now higher going rate, they make a lot of profit. The profit is significantly reduced however when you factor-in the cost of re-stocking 1000 HDDs at the new higher purchase price. A retailer is never going to sell a stock item for less than it costs to re-stock the item, else they would lose money.

Or maybe that's a load of pants, since I don't know about stock-keeping cost wise and I don't work in sales!