[Shot_gunN]

The recent floods in Thailand have affected the major manufacturers of hard drives, though more importantly caused major damage and loss of life.

Within days of this happening a 1gig WD external hard drive jumped in price at PC World from £49.99 to £59.
The same hard drive, 2 weeks after the floods, is now selling for £89.99. Thats nearly an 80% rise in price in less than 3 weeks.

Also I have noticed that the price of blank DVDs and high capacity USB drives (64gig), that are not affected, has started to increase in price too.

Has anyone else noticed this and what do you think?

[cp2]

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1567132

[flagpole]

i'd read about this but untill i looked into buying one recently i hadn't realised how bad it was.

a drive i was looking at a few months back was like £80-£90 the WD 2TB SATA-III 6GB/s Caviar Green Hard Drive - 64MB Cache - is now like £215.

the caviar black is nearer £400.

The SSD guys must be loving it.

[James2001]

It's just opportunistic cashing in, and they're going to find themselves losing out in the long term. I don't think there's really any justification for increases on this scale.

[Shot_gunN]

sorry didnt realise there was another thread. did a quick search before posting.
Yeah, cashing in is the real reason this early on, as much of the stock that has had its prices inflated were bought well before this incident.
The fact it jumped 3 days after it was announced that it may affect prices, and i told the manager of a well known store that as the day before it was £50.
Got told that i was only getting two now before the shortages kicked in and probably didnt need two anyway, this was in front of other customers. So told him where he could stick his money grabbing ways and reported him to his head office.

[pocatello]

Originally Posted by James2001

It's just opportunistic cashing in, and they're going to find themselves losing out in the long term. I don't think there's really any justification for increases on this scale.

No, people will need drives later, this is like oil, they won't lose in any case.

Anyways luckily I bought a couple on sale not that long ago...stocked up

[alias alias]

Luckily i still have a spare 1tb un-opened ready for when i need it, I always buy at least 2 at a time to save on p&p.

[a_c_g_t]

Originally Posted by James2001

It's just opportunistic cashing in, and they're going to find themselves losing out in the long term. I don't think there's really any justification for increases on this scale.

I doubt it, Supply and Demand. Welcome to the world of Capitalism.

The justification is that you want it they have it and what will you be prepared to pay for it.

Me I will just hold off until they go back down. I am sure I will live with my 750GB storage 1x500 1x250 unless (touch wood) they don't breakdown.

And even if they do there's a 3 year RMA on them so alls good.

[flagpole]

There's a good story on the reg today about this:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/201...7/hdd_drought/
some highlights:
-Thai floods have taken out Western Digital and Toshiba's disk drive operations
-prices almost triple (up 180%)
-return to normal in Q2/Q3 next year
-manufacturers prioritising OEMs

Originally Posted by James2001

It's just opportunistic cashing in, and they're going to find themselves losing out in the long term. I don't think there's really any justification for increases on this scale.

i'm not sure i buy this. how can a massive reduction in supply not lead to an increase in price.

[Nilrem]

If you look around te likes of Argos, they're still doing 2tb external drives for about £80
I picked one up last weekend and got a free cope of disc copying software, and a pair of £5 vouchers at the same time as part of an offer.

As for the price of the drives, iirc about 20% or more of the worlds production has basically been knocked out for the short to mid term (probably 3-6 months after the floods go down), at the point in the year when demand is at it's peak, and that's not mentioning that a lot of the companies that make the parts have also been affected (IIRC they built the HDD plants in Thailand in part because they could get many of the parts from local factories).

Even allowing for the fact that unaffected plants can ramp up production a bit, they won't be able to make up demand at the moment, as we're at the peak time for them.

IIRC to make matters worse the likes of Dell and other big companies are/were buying up stocks well in advance to ensure their supplies won't be delayed too much* (I think Acer have publicly said they don't know if they'll be able to get enough drives for their PC/laptop lines), which makes the end user like us buying the odd drive the worst affected, as we're getting what is left over and at the end of the supply chain.


Personally I'm not too worried, I bought the external drive not out of panic but more because I was running low on my spare space - I like to have at least 20% of my total drive space free for backups.

*The likes of Sony and MS will have contracts that mean they're guaranteed a minimum order of X million drivers a month for Y months and those sort of contracts will be the ones that the drive manufacturers fill first.

[flagpole]

Originally Posted by Nilrem

If you look around te likes of Argos, they're still doing 2tb external drives for about £80
I picked one up last weekend and got a free cope of disc copying software, and a pair of £5 vouchers at the same time as part of an offer.

they all appear to be out of stock. for collection or delivery.

[c4rv]

Originally Posted by Nilrem

*The likes of Sony and MS will have contracts that mean they're guaranteed a minimum order of X million drivers a month for Y months and those sort of contracts will be the ones that the drive manufacturers fill first.

We are currently renewing 160k units and Dell have contacted us saying that there could be disruption in supplies and potential price increase. We have enough units in the supply chain to keep us going till the end of the year, as for next year don't know what is happening.

[flagpole]

i guess a potential advantage of this could be that it'll reduce the demand for other components. force their prices down.

i could do with a new PSU and graphics card.

[flagpole]

i've been looking at the 2TB WD green drive on ebuyer. from it's peak of £215 it appears to have come down twice now to 200 and now 190, still a lot more than the £70-80 it was mind.

[pocatello]

Originally Posted by flagpole

i guess a potential advantage of this could be that it'll reduce the demand for other components. force their prices down.

i could do with a new PSU and graphics card.

Doubtful, nvidia cards supposedly flying off the shelves...

battlefield 3!
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...es-profit.html
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/201...f2012_numbers/
Psu/gpu...not going down anytime soon.

[s2k]

Had a quote for just over £700 (ex vat) to replace 2 dead disks in one of our servers today

[1saintly]

http://www.scan.co.uk/info/wd/page2

Scan have restricted people to 1 hd per order.

[flagpole]

Originally Posted by flagpole

i've been looking at the 2TB WD green drive on ebuyer. from it's peak of £215 it appears to have come down twice now to 200 and now 190, still a lot more than the £70-80 it was mind.

WD 2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s Caviar Green Hard Drive that i'm using to benchmark this has gone up slightly

now £191.47, gone up by like £1.50

[newda898]

I paid £69.99 for this back in March

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Free...1448914&sr=8-2

Now up to £109.99

[Loobster]

Prices in the US have tripled for some items. 250GB drives have gone up from $35 to $90 or $100.

They aren't telling me that they didn't already have all the stock they are selling now before this Thailand thing happened. Gouging of the highest order.

They say that prices won't come down again until 2013. Ouch.

At work, we are now testing HDDs for all customers who request service on computers, before we do virus removal / reloads etc, so that we know before we put any time into the machine if we are going to have to replace the drive, and give them a cost for that. HDDs are being ordered as needed, as the customers need them and only after they have put some cash down.

I got lucky - there was a flyer printed before they realised the price was going up at a local store, they have 1TB Passport drive on offer at $89.99 in the flyer, the price on the shelf is now $230! They had to honour the price in the flyer, what a shame.

[Wayne Dibbly]

Glad I bought my Seagate 2Tb USB3 drive in May while I was in the US. Best Buys offer price at the time was $69.99.

[Empirical]

Originally Posted by Shot_gunN

Within days of this happening a 1gig WD external hard drive jumped in price at PC World from £49.99 to £59.

£59 for one gig? We need to invade!

[jjesso123]

I've got 6x2tb so I think I'm fine for few years.

[max99]

Originally Posted by Loobster

At work, we are now testing HDDs for all customers who request service on computers, before we do virus removal / reloads etc, so that we know before we put any time into the machine if we are going to have to replace the drive, and give them a cost for that.

Just finished working on a laptop with 'no sound and running a bit slow'. After spending a few hours sorting out the sound and giving it a good clean-up, it was running nicely again. Decided to give it one final test, so switched on...

Click...Click...Click.

Arghhh.

[GrizzyDee]

I just got a 2TB Seagate for £79.99 from argos. Had to check the website every day for about a week to find one in stock in my area though.