After reading the posts here, and confirming new egg and tiger price increases, I took the plunge and bought a 3 tb WD my book external on sale this weekend at Best Buy for $129.99. I was going to hold off till xmas, but glad I didn't. I think the big boxes have their ad's planned out pretty far in advance so they were probably locked into the old prices. I'm just loving the usb3 capabilities of this drive. It's the first device I have had that used it.
I bought a WD20EARX for $63 in July. It is now $199, more than triple the price in Melbourne.
I had a WD20EARS fail at the same time, and they replaced it with a WD20EARX without question, which probably wouldn't have happened after the floods.
I notice that SSD drive prices also haven't been moving? Retailer capitalising on the price rises of mechanical drives seeing an opportunity to make some extra $$ or is there another reason why SSDs are not moving price wise?
Oh crap...I was going to get a 2TB HDD but seeing the price nearly double I think I will hold off for now. Just going to have to delete some stuff instead....
*click click*
Article:If you haven’t noticed yet, there will be a serious issue in the availability of hard drives. This is because of the major flooding that has occurred in Thailand. While this natural disaster is incredibly unfortunate for the people of Thailand, we also will see the supply chain impacted significantly for hard drives and other subcomponents. Some ship dates at one of the largest server and storage brands in the US now list estimated ship dates after March of 2012.
In terms of news, one report puts production offline for the rest of 2011 and a statement from Seagate confirms that supplies will be short of expected demand. I had a chance to check with a few storage companies to get their perspective on this event, and there is a consensus that the impact will be significant. Drew Meyer, senior director of product marketing at NETGEAR told me that they have an inventory to go through the current quarter (Q4) of 2011. However, immediately, pricing for drives has increased as much as 70% in the last two weeks. Sourcing drives independently may become attractive to NETGEAR customers, as the ReadyNAS series of disk product have diskless options that allow the customer to source drives on their own if they choose and can purchase outside of the price fluctuations.
Plan now for serious hard drive shortages: Tips to reduce risk | TechRepublic
Article:The most immediate impact is rising prices and falling inventory of standalone drives, in the wake of the flooding in Thailand where roughly half of the world's drives are made.
"Prices are going up. We're running out of stock and no longer taking back orders," said a sales representative at PC Connection, a major online reseller.
"We have half the stock we used to have," the sales rep added.
A sales representative at CDW, another major reseller, said prices have jumped as much as $100 on some HDDs.
Hard-disk shortage hits consumer outlets | Nanotech - The Circuits Blog - CNET News
Related:"Plan now for serious hard drive shortages"
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/net...76?tag=nl.e102
I was at the CompUSA store in Tampa, Fl, last Saturday. They had what appeared to be a full stock of hard drives on the allocated shelf space. Prices appeared to be "normal".
I was in Thailand summer just gone, I should have picked some up! Will hopefully be going back next year...get your HDD orders in! lol
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news...l-factory.aspx
I'm kind of ashamed of myself how I didn't stock up on hard drives before this crisis happened. Doing some projects right now and could use some extra space. Like the average person, usually I just buy another one when I'm running out. I'm not like some people who have a whole case of hard drives for emergencies.
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