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Hard drive prices double after Thai floods
HARD DISK DRIVE (HDD) prices have more than doubled in the six weeks between 1 October and 14 November after the floods in Thailand.
According to data from price comparison web site Idealo.co.uk, average selling prices increased by 151 per cent during the time period. In monetary terms, this was an increase from £43.29 to £109.78 and it equated to a price increase of 5.4 per cent per day.
Dating back to May 2011, prices for the most popular hard drives remained "extremely consistent", Idealo said, with the average lowest price coming in at around £44.
However, beginning in late October and peaking in early November, the web site said there has been a dramatic increase in the prices offered by online stores on Idealo's British, French, German and Italian comparison portals.
International Data Corporation (IDC) recently reported that as of early November, half of Thailand's production capacity was directly impacted by the flooding. Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 per cent of worldwide HDD production in the first half of 2011. µ
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Went to a computer fair and should have done my research beforehand.. from £25 to £75 for a 500GB SATA drive. I was like, er, what just hit me a freight train?
I just hope the folks in the floods are doing better and rebuilding their lives. I don't know when prices will stabilize or approach anything near what they were (no chance of fallback plants?), maybe someone more knowledgeable than me knows. Perhaps a proportion of this increase could go towards helping the people over there feed and cloth themselves, and rebuild their homes. Can replace hard drives..unlike human life :)
Got my new 3tb drive at the original cost, they kept the price down and one per customer until out of stock.
Brings me up to 26tb for my main computer, resonable amount for home use.
I bought a batch of Samsung 2Gb drives in August for about 75 squid.
They're now pushing 225. Just as well I can wait.
WRT price gouging: something similar happened after the Sumitomo fire and it kept ram prices up for several years but in this case if the prices stay high for long SSD will eat the mechanical makers' dogfood.
Even with all the chest beating about eggs in baskets (all the factories around bangkok) the HDD market is critically dependent on TDK, BASF and Xyratex as single points of failure and has been for some time. problems at any of the three would make the current supply glitch look minor.
No such thing as a Blue Ray DVD
Did you just crawl under a rock to "report" this? What's next, the Berlin Wall fell?
SSD will be cheaper than 10k HDD.
Flash producers should now cut the prices to attack 2.5" market.
TABLETS AND CELL PHONES DONT USE HARD DRIVES. ALSO FOR LAPTOPS AND OTHER COMPUTERS, LOTS OF PEOPLE WANT TO HAVE A SSD INSTEAD ANYWAY.
IF THERE ARE NO DISKS LEFT, DOES THAT MEAN DOS CAN FINALLY DIE ALREADY? OH WAIT I FORGOT ABOUT CDS AND DVDS AND BLUE RAY DVDS. WELL SURELY THEY ARE NEARLY DEAD TOO THEN.
AW RATS AND I NEVER GOT TO OWN A 15,000 RPM SPINNING MEDIA. OH WELL MAYBE I WILL GO GET A MURDERCYCLE.
Maybe this is indicitive of my age but harddrive prices have seemed unrealisically low for a couple years now.
when the production capacity returns to pre-flooding times?
I smell price gouging...