Report: HDD prices finally back to pre-flood levels

In 2011, massive flooding in Thailand caused hard drive manufacturers like WD, Toshiba and Samsung to halt production in the nation, causing a shortage in hard drive supply and an almost 50 percent jump in prices as demand continued its exponential growth.

According to cloud data backup provider Blackblaze, prices have finally stabilized back to pre-crisis levels, although still higher than if the crisis had never occurred and the long-term trend had continued.

During that time, hard drives have gotten more efficient and larger drives, including 4TB, have become more mainstream.

A few of Blackblaze's charts:

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 30 Nov 2013 22:55

Mysttic

Will the trend continue, or will corporations see an opportunity to cash in on profit margin; I wonder.

1.12.2013 06:18 #1

Interestx

Here in the UK they're not.

Pre-flood I bought 2tb HDDs for �53, today the same drives from the same supplier are �65.

They have a way to go yet (although I did get some Buffalo 3tb drives for �75 on an offer recently, which seemed the best value I could find).

1.12.2013 12:07 #2

KillerBug

To be fair to the HDD manufacturers, the values of currencies have dropped a lot since the flood as well. If you were paying for your new hard drive with gallons of gas, grams of gold, or (LoL) bitcoins, the price would be way down.

2.12.2013 14:35 #3

ZippyDSM

150$ for a 4tb USB3 WD drive is not a bad deal ^0^

Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Lets renegotiate them.

---
Check out my crappy creations
http://zippydsmlee.deviantart.com/

2.12.2013 15:28 #4

hearme0

Yeah.......this is old news as prices went back to normal about 3 months ago if not longer.

This "report" is like reading today's paper......tomorrow.

4.12.2013 21:20 #5

mscritsm

Part of the reason for prices not following the historic curve down is that we've reached the end of the huge recording density improvements since around 2004 from the introduction of perpendicular recording. There are serious physical limitations due to magnetic grain size and how small write heads can be made and still do perpendicular recording at greater densities.

For that reason, Seagate has introduced Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) which increases densities but has serious write penalties. WD has introduced helium-filled drives which allow it to stuff more platters into the drive. The future for HDDs will be one of serious tradeoffs in cost vs. performance.

5.12.2013 21:48 #6

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