Giveaway of the Day Forums

1. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   If you are planning to build a new computer or upgrade you hard drives soon, now is the time to go buy the HDD’s. The floods in Thailand have shut down factories where a large part of the computer industries hard drive production was based. Prices have already begun to increase rapidly.

   I’m in the middle of building a new gaming rig and decided to leave purchasing more hard drives for the system until I’d purchased most of the other components such as the case, motherboard, c.p.u, graphics cards etc. Now I’m regretting the decision to leave purchasing HDD’s till later. I did purchase a 2TB drive several months ago, which cost me around £80. The same drive now costs £162. All the high capacity drives are increasing faster than the lower one’s but they are still rising across the board, so I would highly recommend you purchase your HDD requirements now before the prices rise further.

   I was checking a particular site yesterday for price comparisons and they said that they had been forced to raise prices from between 200 to 300% for their hard drives.

   If you do heed my advice do shop around though as there are still some distributors that are selling HDD’s that haven’t been inflated in price by too much. You may find that they will limit the number you can purchase though. I tried to purchase 4 x 1.5TB drives last night and was told I could only purchase 1 (I actually wanted 2 x 3TB drives, but they were much more expensive. As my new case has around 9 hard drive bays I thought it would be a good idea to buy smaller capacity drives so that if a hard drive died on me in a few years, loss of data would be limited somewhat. That said I only use large capacity drives for my steam games which can easily be re-downloaded and for back-ups such as Acronis back-ups and images storage so those drives aren’t accessed as frequently as the root directory. I’ll be installing the OS for my new build on one of the new solid state drives so hard disc failure is less likely.

   http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/seagate-wd-hard-disk-drive-thailand-flood,news-36817.html
   http://ibnlive.in.com/news/thai-floods-boost-pc-hard-drive-prices/197185-11.html

   http://www.modbee.com/2011/10/20/1911714/thailand-floods-slow-hard-drive.html

   Posted 13 years ago #
2. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   For those wanting a graphical representation of what WR said, take a gander at the Amazon price history for a Western Digital Caviar Black 2 TB SATA III 7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Hard Drive (WD2002FAEX).

   Maybe we should be stockpiling hard drives instead of buying gold?

   Posted 13 years ago #
3. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   The increased prices and restricted supply of new HDs is likely to last for several months at least (perhaps 3 - 4 months) until manufacture of HDs resumes properly. It may be 6 months or more before the supply situation gets back to normal, because of backlogs of PC and laptops manufacturers orders.

   Some people have already been out of luck over getting a new PC for Christmas because of the HD shortage.

   Posted 13 years ago #
4. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/small_profit_for_asus/

   ASUS: 'We run out of hard disks at the end of the month'

   Good job we make all those Flash-based netbooks

   "Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop," Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters.

   He added that the prices of HDDs are very mixed at the moment with some prices surging 20 to 40 per cent. ®

   Posted 13 years ago #
5. 

   Anonymous
   Unregistered

   I'm all for trying to save money but encouraging everyone to buy multiple hard drives that they don't really need is just going to cause prices to increase even faster. Sure the prices are rising but I think we tend to overreact to these situations.

   Posted 13 years ago #
6. 

   Pixiey
   Member

   However, if you are buying a new computer or going to soon, it might be smart to order soon instead of waiting for something like say Black Friday. You might be disappointed. Thank you for the warning, I had read about this and am glad I did not wait to get my laptop later this month.

   Pixiey

   Posted 13 years ago #
7. 

   Deserthead47
   Member

   Bought a few high capacity hd's in the last 18 months,I'm glad I did.I've got more than enough space for a few years yet....

   Posted 13 years ago #
8. 

   Whiterabbit-uk
   Games Guru

   In answer to rta's suggestion, we all have different HDD requirements, so the suggestion isn't really out of place, however I can see what you are saying. Demand for HDD's is bound to increase over the short term so prices may inflate even more than necessary due to the supply and demand forces that tend to rule such unfortunate disasters.

   Unfortunately I am one of those users that do require more than just a few HDD's installed, at least on my main computers. I have five in most of my computers and all of them are virtually full (for whatever reasons). I'm doing another round of spring cleaning at the moment just to free up some space. My Steam drive in my present gaming computer is only 2TB which isn't nearly enough to accommodate all of my steam games by at least another 2TB; I have virtually half of my Steam games (over 1600) uninstalled because I don't have the space at the moment on my present gaming computer. I'm hoping 2 x 2TB drives will be sufficient for the games in my new build, though I suspect I'm going to have to use a 2 + 3TB combination. Due to the rapid price hikes I've had to restrict the number I’ll be installing to a total of 8.5TB. (3TB + 2TB + 2TB + 1.5TB plus a smaller SSD for the operating system. That may seem like far too much to some community members but I will be needing every last Gigabyte as I want to hold at least one back up on the computer rather than relying on just my external drives, plus I have many more non steam games that I'd like to install. If you consider some of the newer games for example the last three Total War games - Empire, Napoleon and Shogun 2 are all over 20GB in size and my Battlefield 2 games folder is approaching 150GB in size you can easily see why I need so much space. 8.5TB no longer seems so much when you have to accommodate over 1600 steam games plus loads more as well as back-ups and other stuff.

   I'm sure things have been exaggerated somewhat in the press. Maybe even by the HDD manufacturers themselves just so that HDD's can be increased in price as we've seem massive price cuts over the last decade and the markets have been very depressed of late (though I'm sure the awful floods over in SE Asia do have a contributory factor. I'm also sure that the price will never return to what they were last month even once production returns to normal.

   Posted 13 years ago #
9. 

   ChrisS
   Administrator

   I'm also sure that the price will never return to what they were last month even once production returns to normal.

   I think that's a reasonable expectation. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina coffee prices at the supermarket increased substantially, allegedly due to damage at the Port of New Orleans. Now some 6 years later they're still 30-40% higher than pre-Katrina. Coffee, like hard drives, is a commodity and the price is set by supply and demand, but a big part of demand is how much the consumer is willing to pay. Once the consumer is accustomed to paying higher prices then the higher price is the new "normal" price, and the longer the higher prices are in effect, the greater the likelihood of higher "normal" prices.

   The obvious counter argument is the slow economy with both PC and peripheral manufacturers needing to move units to clear inventory... too much supply and not enough demand will lower prices. The outcome will depend on the purchase split between need vs. desire. I bought my "needed" drives in May so I'll postpone my "wanted" drives until later. For some though, the need is now.

   Posted 13 years ago #
10. 

    Whiterabbit-uk
    Games Guru

    Let's hope it is your latter argument that prevails. :)

    Posted 13 years ago #
11. 

    Anonymous
    Unregistered

    ok I just caved to the panic and ordered a 2TB drive from amazon for $149 even though I don't really "need" it at the moment. I may put it in a previous build that has a smaller drive or it may end up staying in the shipping box for a while. Now I can move on to more important things to worry about. :)

    Posted 13 years ago #
12. 

    Anonymous
    Unregistered

    Wow I just checked the drive I purchased last night and the price has increased from $149 to $169 and it's only available from a 3rd party now. On 10/16 you could have purchased this drive for about $80.

    Posted 13 years ago #
13. 

    BentlyTCow
    Member

    Yeah, in September I bought a 750gb drive for a computer I was building for a friend. I checked the price (because of this thread), same exact drive, same exact store, and it has gone up from £35 to £125 ($56 to $201)!!

    Amazing. The computer that cost £357 to build would now cost me £447.

    Anyone who is still considering it it may be too late unless you look for drives that are clearanced or refurbished as they may be marked down from before the prices took off; so, while they're still not cheap, they may be cheaper.

    Posted 13 years ago #
14. 

    BuBBy
    Teh adnim

    I just came across a recent delivery invoice for a hard drive (and some other stuff) - only out of curiosity (I don't have any need for more drives just now) I checked the current price in Australia (same dealer, same drive)

    Seagate SATA3 2TB - ST2000DL003

    29/Sep/2011 - $83
    9/Nov/2011 - $199 (41 days later)

    It would be nice to think that once everything gets back to normal, prices can drop just as quickly.

    Posted 13 years ago #

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