Comments | jrittenhouse: Hard drive prices:

jrittenhouse

Hard drive prices:

Dec 21, 2011 16:45

Is it my imagination, but have hard drive prices doubled? I was looking for a new one for Susan (her graphics take up a lot of space) - say, a 1 TB internal SATA - and the prices were around US $65 - now, they’re twice that and more! What happened?

i'm-not-making-this-up-you-know, peeves, computers, tech, peeve, shoppies!, money, business

Comments 8

sethb December 21 2011, 21:50:37 UTC

There was a flood in Thailand that hit some of the factories.

ckd December 21 2011, 22:05:36 UTC

Where "some" is, IIRC, "most". When I was at Best Buy recently looking for a case, there was a sign saying that due to the flooding and supply shortages they were limiting hard drive purchases to 1 per customer.

jiawen December 21 2011, 22:23:52 UTC

The same thing happened at MicroCenter: "Limit one per customer".

sbisson December 21 2011, 22:29:36 UTC

Nasty floods in Thailand, where most of them are being made...

sraun December 21 2011, 22:50:56 UTC

Flooding in Thailand - among other things, there's this one factory that makes 90+% of some motor used in all hard drives manufactured world-wide that is something like 8' deep in water. Hard-drive prices are up, and are going to stay up for ... some time. I've heard estimates of a year or more.

dave_ifversen December 21 2011, 23:18:34 UTC

Not only did the floods cause problems, but within hours of that news getting out speculators started buying up all the hard drives they could, driving prices up even faster.

Thailand lsanderson December 22 2011, 13:18:01 UTC

The factories were starting up again in Thailand around early December, but supply chain problems were limiting production, plus the pipeline is empty. The best prices I've seen have been for external drives, but they're still waay higher than they were six months ago. The SATA II 3GB green drives are obsolescing, so you might be able to find a deal after Xmas.