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WD HDD Industry Will Be Supply Constrained Due to Thailand Flooding
Sosseres:
--- Quote from: Tatsujin on November 06, 2011, 06:26:20 PM ---I don't want to start a new thread since some of what I want to say is related to this topic. So ... I've checked several sites I go to and the prices for HDD's sky rocketed really high. When do you guys think the prices will calm and go back to normal and how they used to be for HDD's? At the moment, I'm not interested in SSD products. If someone can predict or give a theory of when the prices of HDDs will come down so I can plan a head of time for the future. Thanks.
--- End quote ---
Flooding is expected to continue for another week at least. After that they have to asses which factories that still are operational, with water, electricity and so on functional. Then they have to start producing from whatever works. Then start replacing what was broken or needs long set up times to get exactly correctly working.
3 months, minimum.
Natheria:
--- Quote from: AnimeJanai on November 06, 2011, 01:27:36 AM ---Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too? I still see their prices dropping. This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.
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I highly doubt a price increase. The severe dollar/GB price gap is the very reason why the HDD market still exists. If anything this an opportune time for them to emphasize SSDs more. This spike may create more demand for SSDs given that for the moment, the price gap has shrunk even more.
vuzedome:
Time to get cheap and reliable SSD for system and do some cleaning(deleting) with the old stuff.
Ultra_Magnus:
@vuzedome, dude, I have hard drives in storage bigger than some of yours, why do you have so many small ones?
--- Quote from: Natheria on November 07, 2011, 12:01:47 AM ---
--- Quote from: AnimeJanai on November 06, 2011, 01:27:36 AM ---Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too? I still see their prices dropping. This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.
--- End quote ---
I highly doubt a price increase. The severe dollar/GB price gap is the very reason why the HDD market still exists. If anything this an opportune time for them to emphasize SSDs more. This spike may create more demand for SSDs given that for the moment, the price gap has shrunk even more.
--- End quote ---
And won't a increase in demand increase prices? unless of course the is a similar increase in supply.
AnimeJanai:
@Ultra_Magnus
Probably because he buys as additional storage gigabytes are needed as opposed to people who swap out multiple drives for bigger ones. It's the way I buy drive storage too, so I still have some older almost full 250GB drives hanging on at the tail end. When the next drive is bought, some of the older drives content will be migrated into the new larger drive. This gradual migration not only saves money, but ensures that if the newer drives are unreliable, I don't get a whole bunch of drives going bad at the same time. It's amazing what the quality control in chinese HDD factories will let through in HDD manufactured for Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi. I remember buying one nasty 2TB 32MBcache hitachi drive (made in china) whose drive cache read 25MB in size as if one 8MB section of the cache had gone bad.
Seagate and Western Digital are the only two HDD "makers" now due to samsung and hitachi being bought up and merged. As I see it, a lot of their discount drives are rebadged ones wholly manufactured in China so my impression of Seagate or WD is that they are a shadow of what they are used to be as companies. Buying up competitors allows them to control the market pricing as there is no longer one "rogue" HDD supplier out there to supply drives at a low price if the other HDD suppliers decide to raise their prices in a gamble to manipulate the overall prices higher regardless of supply vs demand. Capitalism doesn't mean companies follow the supply vs demand rule of pricing; it means they try to manipulate the market prices higher whenever they can. What the HDD market needs right now is for a 3rd supplier from China to emerge to keep Seagate and WD more honest in their drive pricing.
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