HDrive Price increase

Have you checked the Hard Drive prices? Increase because of Thailand Floods...
Pretty surprised, i'm sure lots of other stuff etc... but i stumbled on this while checking stuff out
for a Custom PC assembly for someone.....

You're right. Just checked my supplier and 110% price increase..

This has been well reported in the financial news as it is threatening PC maker supply chains (Dell, even apple).

Stock prices for affected major Drive vendors are off too as their near term earnings will take a hit (Marvell, WD, etc.).

Some middle men may bump up prices in the short term to rebalance reduced supply to existing demand. These prices will drop again later, when supply returns to the distribution channels... it might be a good time to delay HD purchases if not immediately needed. Could be several months to settle out.

JR

Remember when the lamination plant at Burlington NJ burned? Raw PCB prices peaked.

Remember when one of two chip-grade epoxy plants burned? RAM prices soared and speculators were hoarding RAM.

In both cases the prices fell below pre-crisis prices significantly in a year or two.

If you need it now, at low margin, cry. If you need it ongoing, this is no big deal.

If you need it now, at low margin, cry.

Click to expand...

Yep needed for that person so..., 500Go for 90Euros ouch.

Anyway i was surprised... Thanks i don't need HD right now...

zayance said:

Yep needed for that person so..., 500Go for 90Euros ouch.

Click to expand...

the first HD I sold was 600MB for 4500 DM (2250 Euros)  ;D

haha,

In both cases the prices fell below pre-crisis prices significantly in a year or two.

Click to expand...

In the other hand, if that will be the case, SSD will have an affordable price to be the only one in town then, i believe....

SSD will eventually win, but hard drives have a couple of leaps in the higher density and lower cost areas to come very soon.
The problems in Thailand are amplified by the lack of capacity in Japan at the moment.
So the high prices will last a while 

I owned a 13 MEG drive which originally sold for $3,700.

The problem is not drive prices. The problem is that it has become TOO easy to collect e-books and puppy-photos and music tracks.

PRR 'wins" for highest price per megabyte!

My first hard drive was an upgrade (circa 1985???) that I did to my Compaq Portable (purchased in 1984 along with an Okidata dot matrix printer) which shipped with two 5.25" 360K floppies.  The vendor was PC Unlimited from Austin, TX that later became know as Dell <g>.  IIRC, I paid around $500 for a 10 meg drive plus controller card.  I kept adding and adding to that machine throughout the mid 1980's, including a modem.

I can ramble on about Olde computers that I've had, beginning with a Timex/Sinclair (circa 1983???) which used a cassette deck for storage, and connected to my TV set for a display!  I still recall the *first* BASIC "app" that I wrote with the Timex:

10 PRINT "FU*K YOU"
20 GOTO 10

I was giddy when the screen of my 25" Zenith color TV set was over run with my ....ahhh.... cleverness. 

<g>

Best,

Bri

My Atari didn't even have a hard drive

PRR said:

I owned a 13 MEG drive which originally sold for $3,700.

Click to expand...

Holy Cow!

The problem is not drive prices. The problem is that it has become TOO easy to collect e-books and puppy-photos and music tracks.

Click to expand...

So true.  Cheap storage has made us forget how to use DELETE.  I think the mentality spills over into the analog world too.  If you look at my virtual desktop and my physical desktop, there seems to be a correlation.

Ethan said:

PRR said:

I owned a 13 MEG drive which originally sold for $3,700.

Click to expand...

Holy Cow!

The problem is not drive prices. The problem is that it has become TOO easy to collect e-books and puppy-photos and music tracks.

Click to expand...

So true.  Cheap storage has made us forget how to use DELETE.  I think the mentality spills over into the analog world too.  If you look at my virtual desktop and my physical desktop, there seems to be a correlation.

Click to expand...

My first dual floppy disk drive cost me $2700 and the 8" floppy disks only held 256k each. But the computer was fully loaded with 32k of RAM...  and relatively powerful for 3+ decades ago.

You notice how old computers don't hold a similar appeal to old recording gear? 

Anybody miss their old computers, not me...

JR

I think I read recently that factories in Taiwan already been restored - I imagine the prices should go back where they were before, right?

The factories affected by the flooding were in thailand and I have heard reports that it could take months for this to return to normal.

JR

> PRR "wins" for highest price per megabyte!

It came to me at $15. It was 5.25" full height (3" tall), in a case, with a controller, which only worked with the pre-IBM PC Tandy machines.

Of course I stripped it and found a standard Shugart-interface drive, worked with IBM and clone XT/AT controllers. I think I even formatted it RLL for a whopping 19MB.

> Cheap storage has made us forget how to use DELETE.

Disagree. At least _I_ rarely find it worthwhile to "clean". If I truly delete something I need it may be major headache and time/trouble. So I have to think about every file. Say I can think-about 10 files a minute, 600 files an hour. Say an hour of my time is worth $10. Cost to delete is $0.016/file. Say 500GB (500,000MB) costs $100, $0.0002 per megabyte. Files under 83MB are "not worth deleting", it's cheaper to store than to think/delete.

While I have not done this computation recently, I _do_ occasionally skim for those ENORMOUS files which sneak in. ISO files for disappointing O/Ses (leeenux, lupu,  Win7beta). Porno films that got old fast. Core-dumps. SPICE DAT files.

PRR said:

The problem is not drive prices. The problem is that it has become TOO easy to collect e-books and puppy-photos and music tracks.

Click to expand...

Back when all that you could store on your drive was what you had typed, I spent 10-12 hours a day generating wiring lists.  In six years of this activity, I didn't fill a 10MB HD even half way.

I also remember wanting to expand the RAM on my Apple II from 16K to 48K.  It was a proposition that ran into the hundreds of dollars, and my dad said it was preposterous, as no one could write 48K of code! When your perspective is op-codes or assembly language, it seems like an enormous task. Compare to today, when you look at an executable, and find that more often than not, someone who needed a single library function has included the entire library in the application.

Soon enough storage will be infinite to us.  Trying to fill a typical storage device will be like trying to fill the universe with sand one grain at a time.  It won't be a matter of 'where do I put it?", but "where did I put it?".  20 years ago I was talking about the wondrous possibilities of the 1GB HD, and a colleague rightly pointed out that 'search' was the real problem.

I was stitched up by a supplier a few weeks ago on a HD order. Ordered several (they had plenty in stock) when drives didn't turn up i contacted them, only for them to say my drives had been discontinued but they had alternates. The alternates were 2 x the price... I declined.

anyway found these today if any one needs a 1TB drive.  (just ditch the enclosure)
http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/seagate-freeagent-goflex-desk-external-hard-drive-1tb-06824039-pdt.html

Content is made in China

yep prices suck and i was just about to fork out some money for a 2 TB NAS in a RAID config. Now i think i'll just buy the NAS and put a few old disks in there just to bridge the time till i find some cheap HD's.

greetings,

Thomas