Skyrocketing price of mechanical hard drives

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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

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!