Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren’t | Hacker News Reader

Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren’t

arstechnica.com

33 pointswisesage500111 comments

Not only are prices up, the Major Hard drive manufactures (Seagate, Western Digital) have cut back a lot of their warrantees to only one year. Evidence suggests that the spinning disk manufacturing companies are reluctant to invest in aggressively building supply/plants because of the transition to SSDs - the market demands for Hard Drives will be met - but nobody is expecting explosive growth will continue to grow.

SSDs are finally within about a factor of 3x where they need to be before their usage in Laptops hockey sticks, and a factor of 4x before they make major inroads into desktops. In about 18-24 months, we'll start to see a natural reduction in Hard Drive shipments as people just start buying fewer of them, and a _huge_ leap in SSDs and other flash based storage.

Just a note, consumer-grade drives had their warranty cut.

HDD manufacturers have consolidated...What exists now is a duopoly. There was no reason for Seagate to cut warranties if their facilities were not affected by the natural disaster. They are never going to lift the warranty back to 3 years like before.

They're already moving into the datacenter as well.

They've been there for a few years already at the high end. EMC sold my former employer 2TB of SSD SAN back in '09.

And at the same time there's a story on HN[1] about SSDs being half their price. Enjoy the record profits while they last, the world is moving to SSDs and this will only speed up that migration.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182944

I doubt warranty is a major consideration when choosing between HDD and SSD drives.

SSDs on the other hand have great warranties. Crucial offers 3 years while Plextor and Samsung offer 5 years.

I didn't bring up warranty. How does that work with my comment?

He doubtlessly meant to respond to ghshephard's comment [1]. Hopefully that clears up some confusion :).

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4183869

Gotcha. I was reading from the comment section of my profile and didn't see all the comments.

If this is what the market is willing to pay for them, than the prices pre-flood were too low. Simple economics?

They are now making more profit while shipping less, loved it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com