What happened to hard drive prices?!

[Brian]

I've been out of the computer hardware knowledge game for a little bit now and I'm looking at maybe getting a second drive for my system now because I'm running low on space and don't want to burn a stack of discs. I'm looking at just a plain Jane internal SATA drive and holy crap what happened with the prices? Newegg and NCIX for example I'm having a hard time finding anything cheaper than $80 or $90...and that's for about 300GB. I seem to recall that just last year you could get a terabyte drive for that much in some cases. I understand the SATA 3 and SATA 6 capabilities now but wow I would have thought you could find a hard drive cheaper than that now. I have a motherboard capable of taking advantage of SATA3 (specs in sig are out of date) but honestly don't want to shell out $80 for a relatively small drive. Does anyone know of any good deals?

[Silent_Avenger]

The flood in Thailand caused it basically.

Retailers Respond to Upcoming HDD Shortage by Limiting Purchases & Hiking Prices | Hardware Canucks

[Adzsask]

All the spin drives and good fan bearings are made in japan, I bet you money though another country is already in the works to be making these things in case this happens again.

[b1lk1]

I just scored a brand new full retail Seagate 2TB Green off Ebay for $110 shipped with 4.5 years warranty left. There's deals out there, just not as good as they were before the consumer rape by hard drive companies forcing us to pay for their lack of insight and planning for natural disasters.

[Brian]

That's unfortunate! Look what happens when you take all the jobs away from us tisk tisk.
Guess I'll be buying a spindle of DVDs for now.

[geokilla]

I don't think hard drive prices will ever come down. It's basically a duopoly with little competition now that SSDs are so "cheap."

[Soultribunal]

Originally Posted by geokilla

I don't think hard drive prices will ever come down. It's basically a duopoly with little competition now that SSDs are so "cheap."

They are and have been comming back into something that is more sane. They will have to knock them back if they want to make up for the lost revenue.

Regards,
ST

[moocow]

There's a small drop in price already compared to last Oct to Dec. The price will not come back down at least end of this year, at least that is what Seagate is saying.

[yamawho]

I feel your pain ...

The last hdd I purchased was a 1TB WD black edition for 69$ before the floods.

I have since reorganized my backups and such. Despite a 500GB WD failing on me during the process, I have a few decent ones left a 1TB and a 500GB.

My focus is on SSD's now ...

[bigbui]

hard drive prices are always ridiculous....