Maximum PC

Ok, I haven't had the need to buy a hard drive in about a year, so I really haven't looked....

Holy Crap have the prices gone UP!!! I bought 2Tb 7,200RPM drives for my Home server last year for $100 a pop. Now they're 2 1/2 times the price!

What happened why desktop drives are so expensive now?

thailand, where they make most of them is flooded, most of the hard drive makers have had to shut down the factories over there, creating a rather big shortage.

you could try Fry's they still have some decent prices on some drives, but are limiting purchases to a single drive. http://www.frys.com/category/Outpost/Hard+Drives+&+Memory/Hard+Drives/Internal+Bare+Drives/Serial+ATA/ they have one hitachi 2TB drive for 109 bucks, and another 2TB green drive for 89 bucks a wd i think.

Really only WD and Toshiba suffered directly from the flooding, but a lot of other HDD components are made there as well which probably added onto the kill of overall HDDs on the market. OEMs like Dell and HP freaked out and are basically buying up all the HDDs left in the warehouses for whatever prices available. Prices are still rising as well, ASUS reports they only have stock until the end of this month.

Ah, ok. I get it now.... I can wait until they get back up to speed. Thanks, guys!

That could possibly take some time. They don't expect prices to drop back down to pre-flood levels until a year later.

I bought a 2 TB, 7200 rpm, 64 MB cache Hitachi drive at Fry's just before the flooding in Southeast Asia for $90, that same week they had 5900 rpm 2 TB drives for $70.

I see on the news that all the factories around Bangkok were built on swamps. The land got valuable and factories were built despite the flood risk.

It seems like the prices could be dropping down fast in Q1 now. OEMs figured they didn't need so many HDDs and the scare was blown up way to much.

Been about three weeks since i bought a 1 TB WD Caviiar Black SATA III Hdd for the high price of $119.99. Just saw it earlier for $249.99.

Doesn't look like they've come down much yet...

I know.... before this fiasco, I was buying 2Tb 7,200 Hitachi's for $100.

It is not going to change soon, they are still under water. only thing that may change it is if they ramp up their Chinese or American factories. the prices will remain high to pay for their losses in Tailand.

Yea....making factories in the land of Tsunamis. Almost as dumb as making a city that's 20' below sea level.

truth is, its already been paid for by the difference in labor costs between here and there. since the prices didnt drop any when they moved over there.

I bought mine Transcend hard drive a year ago for about $90. And it's just 500GB. I don't know how much it costs now, but for then I though it was quite expensive.

Kinda the same boat with ya SC. Dispersed 1TB F3 drives from the old server and started anew with the plans on 3TB drives. Bought one in November for $85 just to get it up thinking I'd get a few more the next pay day...and boom, price hike. I still think $150 is cheap for a 3TB drive (even got Leo agreeing that we're spoiled on the air), but I still hoped to see at least $110 by now; and it hasn't.

Are you still using your WHS1 version? The WHS2 still has issues backing up clients over a 1TB boot drive as the prior version, even with EUFI and all that fancy stuff so you're good for now IMO. Drug out the 750G to back up the 120/60/60 SSD clients, run the OS, and trying to serve stuff on the 3TB as well as possible until prices for drives comes down a bit more. It's been filling up quickly though and starting to worry! Since the floods I've added 780G of data and if the trend continues I'll be done by March and have to fork over whatever they ask for another 3TB or just start deleting stuff.

I kinda want to sell of my 6 500gb drives that I have in my old server right now, then wait till 2tb drives get back low again and buy those.

Bangkok, is not subject to Tsunamis as is a ways up river from the coast. Not as to floods, I would suppose so. Bangkok is referred to as the Venice of the Far East due to it's many canals. I don't think the floodng was as prevalent in Bangkok proper, than in the surrounding area. Just probably along the river. Yeah, I have been there and had a great time.

I bought a couple of 3TB WD greens for $110 each a day or two before the floods and went back to get a couple more at that price to be stunned by the fact that they had almost tripled in price to $300 each within a few days.

Now they're back down to $190 each. Luckily I still have one unopened in its package so maybe they'll return to within reason before I have to buy another. Then again a buddy just dropped off a 2TB drive full of large files to share/backup so my last empty 3TB HDD will be 2/3 full. You've gotta love non-internet P2P. The internet won't last forever as we know it but friendships continue on.

until they start putting drm builtin each packet of the file structure that needs a physical usb dongle key to unlock it like they do with high end software.

You guys are really showing how late to the party you are. Not just the floods, but how $200 could get you an 80G Fireball drive.

3TB? It's currently a good price at $230. And memory is awesome at $25 per 8G because that use to cost us $500 per 1G in RAMBUS days. Don't bitch too much or you look spoiled. Be a geek, not a baby.

There's a flood. People die. HDD prices are 1st world issues.