Skyrocketing price of mechanical hard drives

badger906 said:

SSD's don't contain rare earth elements such as neodenium magnets.

They probably contain trace elements of gold and silver, but all circuit boards tend to.

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Please do not talk about something you know nothing about. Thailand is the world's 2nd largest producer of hard drives accounting for approximately 25% of the world's production. Most of the factories that make hard disk drives have been flooded with up to 20 feet of water. It has nothing to do with "rare earth elements." All I ask is you READ before you speculate about thing you do not know or understand.

Most SSD are still made in the good USA.

I am currently aware of the flooding in thialand..
I was replying to the post about SSD's not currently being effected..

And the largest manufacturer of mechanical drives is china.. Which currently has a reduction in rare earth element production and manufacturing...

That's why exports of drives from china hasn't filled the gap from the loss of Thialands production.
Seeings as 94-97% of the global rare earth elements such as the magnets in mechanical drives come from China.
All I ASK is you take an interest in the stock markets

PwnFrnzy said:

That's going to be a very painful wait since I've been wanting to add an extra hard drive or two.

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Hi there
If you have any laptops you've replaced or have some colleagues who are replacing laptops then just remove the HDD and put it in a 10 USD enclosure -- these convert it to standard EXTERNAL USB HDD's.

Even a 160GB external laptop HDD is a useful stopgap -- you can store external data / music / backups even.

Incidentally if you actually BUY a laptop HDD and a 10 USD enclosure it's actually a lot cheaper than some of those "Passport" drives -- which are essentially the same thing only they are packaged up a "bit more sexily". (Note I'm not saying buy a laptop -- just a laptop hdd -- you can get these for as little as 30 USD for a 250 GB one -- enough for a stopgap).

Just wait and see in a few months in any case there will be Over production and prices will fall again.

People used to say only 2 certainties in life "Death and Taxes" -- however we should and a 3rd - "The basic laws of supply and demand").


(Finally as an Engineer -- I have to ask why on earth should a Magnet need rare earths to function -- when I was at school magnets were ether naturally created or done with essentially Ferrites (Iron) when an electric current was passed around coil(s) of usually copper wire wound round the iron core.

Maybe the Laws of Physics have changed since I was at school -- well nearly everything else has !!!).

As for the Stock Market -- I quite often do some trading -- one thing I've learned - and the hard way -- Markets are TOTALLY UNPREDICTABLE. - Sometimes the most depressing news comes out and the markets shoot up ridiculously high -- other times a company announces it's doing really well and its prospects are better than ever -- and guess what --its stock value tanks horribly.

Markets work on Fear and Greed --- people have been doing "Technical analysis" for years to predict stock movements -- with varying degrees of success or lack of it.

Human intuition, LEGAL inside knowledge and an understanding of "Market Psychology" -- The Fear and Greed factor-- are the elements that will make you a successful or a basket case trader.

Cheers
jimbo

I'm contemplating stealing the 250gb drive from my xbox that's never used.

I've stopped fixing computers with hard drive faults as well. Haven't had someone want a rig off me wither lately, which is good I guess lol.

I found a 1tb drive in a store at the weekend for £50! But I got side tracked and forgot to go back and inquire about it when I was done shopping I'd have taken 2 or 3 if the spec was okayish

badger906 said:

I'm contemplating stealing the 250gb drive from my xbox that's never used.

I've stopped fixing computers with hard drive faults as well. Haven't had someone want a rig off me wither lately, which is good I guess lol.

I found a 1tb drive in a store at the weekend for £50! But I got side tracked and forgot to go back and inquire about it when I was done shopping I'd have taken 2 or 3 if the spec was okayish

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Hi there
PC world in most places (not the cheapest usually) still has some quite cheap 3 TB drives !!!!.

I posted a link earlier in this thread.

1TB self powered drives still available too relatively cheaply -- I'm going back to work in Brussels again later today on a long term contract -- I was over in England this weekend to visit some colleagues for the Remembrance weekend --bought 4 of these and the store manager gave me 20 GBP off !!!!.

Cheers

Pc world and cheap never go hand in hand unless "is not" is somewhere inbetween! Lol

I shall check that out, I never even bothered looking at pc world, I just dismissed them as too expensive to start with based on past experiences.

Hi there
Here you are
3 TB GBP 119.99 Available in store today (14 Nov) (Approx 180 USD / 130 EUR).
INC VAT.

If you can get the VAT refund as well then it's a real bargain -- I got 1 of these as well as 3X 1 TB passport self powered drives

SEAGATE STAY3000202 External USB 2.0 Hard Drive - 3TB, Black at cheap prices | PC World

cheers
jimbo

Thanks a lot Jimbo!

I can feel my bank accout trying to run away from me!

Its just a question of do I buy 1 3tb drive and stick it in my home server, or 2 1tb drives with RAID. Orrr say sod it to my server and run one of those as NAS.. Why can't I have a cheap hobby!!! Already spent £1500+ in the last month or so on computer stuff!

badger906 said:

Why can't I have a cheap hobby!!! Already spent £1500+ in the last month or so on computer stuff!

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Ditto

"This is the last thing I need for months - I swear.... Order. Sumbit. Repeat"

I just purchased the last part of my latest pc!! So then technically I need nothing..

Just my new server build to finish after that.. But on hold due to stupid HHD prices!

Hi there

We're all in the same boat !!!!

I bought a brilliant state of the art Sony Vaio i5 laptop with a Huge nice screen and 8GB memory
/ 500 GB HDD.

But Guess what:

I'm on my way to Brussels with an ACER Aspire one netbook with 4GB memory installed and put a 500 GB HDD 7500 RPM in it instead of the 120 GB standard HDD-- so much more portable and with an external Monitor no complaints at all --the AMD dual core processors work fine for 90% of applications including Photoshop CS5.

The Sony is mega great but try getting on crowded trains /planes with 14 / 15 inch screen laptop.

The Sony I've left at home to be used instead of a desktop.

Cheers
jimbo

Beta said:

Most SSD are still made in the good USA.

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Can you name one?
Some of the new NAND chips might be produced in Virginia and Utah but most SSD drives and NAND are made in Singapore. (Intel, Seagate, Crucial (Micron), Samsung, STEC, et. al.)

Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Fujitsu and Samsung are all Thailand based HDD manufacturers. Thailand accounts for about 70% of the HDD market.

As of today, there's about 14 days of HDD stock left in the "pipeline". It's expected to take about 60-days, after about a 30-day clean-up, to reach production levels and another 30-days to re-fill the "pipeline". At best, it will be four months before you'll see new HDD drives. At about 200 Million drives a month, the market will be hungry! And it WILL be China that has their hands in the pie too.

i thought Thailand only accounted for like 45% as its second to china in terms of production.

your forcast is scary! im hoping that for months is the maximum! ive been reading other reports that state q2 of next year! thats almost 10months!

Q2-2012 sounds about right but April 1 would be Q2. So the rest of November, December, January, February and March to go.

That's if they started clean-up today. Most factories, as I understand, still have a couple of meters of water in them. :shock:

Ff you have any laptops you've replaced or have some colleagues who are replacing laptops then just remove the HDD and put it in a 10 USD enclosure -- these convert it to standard EXTERNAL USB HDD's.

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Most docking stations will handle both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. If you have USB 3.0 5 Gb/s you may find the drives will run at full speed in USB 3.0 docks. At least my 3.5" WD Caviar Black 6 Gb/s drives do.

Depends on your situation. If you want drives to throw in a canvas bag then the enclosure may be preferable. But if you want to swap drives around with your desktops the docks are ideal. I have a USB 2.0 dock on my WD TV set top box. Just slide an internal drive in to play videos. (It's the old Gen1 no Live network, but the dock is nearly as convenient.)

Forgot to mention: NASA has a satellite image of the area taken October 31st. The image covers approximately 2500 square miles and about 1/4-1/3 of that is under water.

I recently bought two WD 3TB drives from Newegg at $79.xx each. They are now selling at over $157.00 each.

It's really tough because I still need to purchase 4 more 3TB drives to replace 7 1.5 TB drives on my media server/HTPC. I also need two move 3TB drives to serve as backups for the HTPC on my 'main' machine which corrently contains the previously purchased 3TB drives partially backing up the HTPC.

carwiz said:

Beta said:

Most SSD are still made in the good USA.

Click to expand...

Can you name one?
Some of the new NAND chips might be produced in Virginia and Utah but most SSD drives and NAND are made in Singapore. (Intel, Seagate, Crucial (Micron), Samsung, STEC, et. al.)

Click to expand...

LSI makes alot of the controllers chips in the USA for many companies.

ATTENTION UK PEOPLE (don't mean to be countriest lol)

I just found a seller in the uk selling 1tb sata3 western digital drives for £50.
http://item.mobileweb.ebay.co.uk/viewitem?itemId=200671327146&cmd=VIDESC&index=1&nav=WATCHING&nid=49658309007

I appologies for the mobile site, ebays being odd on my blackberry today as I can't get 3g lol.

I just snapped one up and may get a second, only has 7 left!

Four years ago I paid $80 for a 250 GB drive.
So today, $157 for a 3 TB drive is cheap.
That's 6x more for the dollar.
CHEAP!