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Hard drive prices drop
HARD-DRIVE prices are dropping thanks to competition from flash memory and tough competition.
According to a survey released by iSuppli the average pricing of notebook hard drives fell to $53 in the third quarter of 2007, from $86 in the same period during the previous year.
Desktop hard drive prices fell to $51 in the third quarter of 2007, compared to $52.75 the previous year.
There were 21 per cent more hard drives shipped in the third quarter of 2007.
iSuppli thinks that there is now such strong competition between the six hard drive vendors Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics that prices were coming down fast.
The outfit is predicting that prices for hard drives may also drop further as flash memory evolves.
More here . µ
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Unfortunately, iSuppli's comments are about 6 months late. The real story in the HDD industry today is that prices have largely stabilised since mid year. The is, (as any Business 101 student might think intuitively) because the supply/demand equation has largely been in balance or tilted slightly towards heavy demand. iSupply's comments seem to more accurately reflect conditions in the industry during the first half of 2007. At that time Seagate and WD were ramping their new mobile products and taking share away from HGST. Samsung tried to join this party but stumbled on technical problems. The mobile 2.5 inch segment grew an astounding 30% in the third quarter to 40m units based on very brisk laptop demand which is continuing in Q4 today. To quote Avian Securities Research: "List pricing for desktop HDDs in North American distribution fell modestly week over week. Pricing for 160 GB SATA drives fell 0.7% with most other SATA configurations flat to down less than 1%. Our distribution data suggests channel inventories remain modest. While there is some availability at every capacity point, various drives continue to move off and on allocation across manufacturers and distributors. In particular, we see relatively tighter conditions at the 250 GB and 500 GB capacity points. Such healthy inventory conditions have translated to consistent pricing in the channel. Our indices shows steady list pricing since July with ASPs even inching up in both the 160 GB and 320 GB segments." 
Either iSupply was slightly outdated in their remarks or the press picked up on dated data from the report.However, the accelelration of change is such that all might be different next week.
looking at the cost of average desktop storage prices - $51(£25), shows that the majority of users are not interested in fulling their boots with large media files, so the smallest disk they can buy still has more than enough storage capacity for them. Once solid state storage gets up to around 40GB at a reasonable price, I think spinning platter merchants will lose the low capacity end of the market.
I think it is going to take more than equivalent pricing for SSDs to take the low end from hard drives. There is a small matter of long-term reliability and number of write operations that are important also.