HDD prices not going down so soon

End of last year was marked by an uprising of prices for HDDs due to floods in Thailand. It has also been a while since we last heard about the economic state of these drives, a quick look reveals that prices don’t see to be ‘willing’ to come back down.

It all began in July last year, when floods in Thailand forced Western Digital and Toshiba to halt productions in their plants located there. As a result, stocks went short, pushing prices extremely high.

Some “pessimists” predicted the shortage to be dragged well into 2012, while other more “optimists” said everything would come back down by the end of January…unfortunately for us, it seems the former were right.

Checking on the 3.5″ pricing in Europe, we can see that nothing has budged more or less, or at least not positively, and you can forget about getting back to pre-flood levels for now. Prices during this entire period went up to €25 per GB, spiking at almost €40 by October. Looking at the same product from three distinct companies, WD, Samsung and Seagate, reveals that it’s the same everywhere, with retailers going even further in some cases, offering high end models of 2TB drives at well over €100.

All this certainly leaves a rather sour taste in your mouth when you think back on the €49 deals of beginning 2011.

The 2.5″ drives are also affected, as well as external hard drives alike. Businesses on the other don’t seem to find too much trouble, enterprise drives, SAS and SCSI units aren’t affected, but they have a rather insignificant share in the retail market due to their aim towards home and small business users.

However, the light seems to be at the end of the tunnel, we could see the supply chains stabilizing by the end of the quarter hopefully, but as far as here and now go, it’s probably the best time to look into the purchase of a SSD.

Source: Fudzilla