
Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren’t - wisesage5001
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/hard-drive-supplies-back-to-pre-flood-levels-but-prices-arent/
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ghshephard
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.

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philwelch
They're already moving into the datacenter as well.

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beedogs
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.

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MichaelApproved
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>

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inuhj
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

