Hard drive price fall?

[Gray]

So with the floods over in Asia the prices of hard drives skyrocketted hugely, pretty much doubling the price of the original valuations.

I've had my eyes on two hard drives at the moment, a Crucial SSD 64gb SATAIII hard drive which is currently valued at £80. According to the website camelcamelcamel.com this specific hard drive started out at a high price before dropping significantly as shown by this graph from the website.

Meaning that the hard drive itself hasn't been affected in a negative way by any shortage due to the flooding that occured.

However on the proper hard drives this is where the prices shot up. I've had my eye on a WD Cavier Blue 500gb SATAIII hard drive for a while, but the price has been steadily rising instead of decreasing. The price about 7-8 months ago was only about £30-40 but has since doubled, meaning it's not really an overall decent purchase. Again, as shown by the graph on CCC.

It's hard to predict if maybe the January sales will bring any good news, i was sure hoping for something decent to happen around the Black Friday stuff but it never did regarding hard drives, and obviously monsoon's will continue to hit Asia next year meaning prices may never go down?

 

[Kryten]

They will soon come down. Retailers and OEMs will undoubtedly milk the excuse as long as they can. In the meantime there's plenty of people around shipping drives for a "more normal" price as they're getting them from inside external units.

Anyway, slight pedantism : "a Crucial SSD 64gb SATAIII hard drive" - it's an SSD, not a hard drive!

 

[Gray]

Bahhh SSD. I thought it was a bit interesting that the prices didn't seem to affect the SSD drives in relation to the floods.

Which then begs the question, those SSD drives are slowly decreasing from 6 months ago, will they continue to decrease into the new year or be completely unrelated to the issues which hard drive manufacturers are suffering from, thus, the price we have now may well be the best price for a long time.

 

[caLLous]

I didnt think SSD production was affected anyway, I thought it was just mechanical drives that were mostly made in Thailand.

 

[rynnor]

Hmm - I fancy building an SSD gaming pc now - whats a decent high speed motherboard that can properly support these - I'd use one SSD for system and another for games or would that slow it down compared to one large one?

 

[Gray]

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8


This is what i want. Really.

But one will do for now, i've seen how much it improves game loading speed times. Truely insane.

 

[caLLous]

You could always push the boat out and plug one of these straight into a PCI-E slot.

 

[Zenith.UK]

I haven't laughed so much in ages.
It's faster to transfer 700MB from one place to another than it is to throw the DVD out of the window.

 

[Syri]

I didnt think SSD production was affected anyway, I thought it was just mechanical drives that were mostly made in Thailand.

Correct, it was mostly factories making the motors that were affected. Seeing as SSDs don't use motors, they were completely unaffected, and continue to fall in price as most silicon chip products do, as yields improve and demand increases.

 

[gmloki]

Hard Drive pricing will soften this month then you will see it increase again then maintain the high price for at least the first 3-4 months this year

 

[Ch3tan]

Hard Drive pricing will soften this month then you will see it increase again then maintain the high price for at least the first 3-4 months this year

Why?