
1TB Hard Drive Prices up 180% in a Month - mrb
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=62
======
ramanujan
This is a pretty good concrete example of why Kryder's law[1] and related laws
are phenomenological observations rather than laws of nature. Good to cite in
a slide deck if you need an explicit example of when exponential progress was
stopped.

It took something pretty big, and it took a direct hit. For example, Moore's
law itself looks to have continued without noticeable interruption [2] through
Katrina, the financial crisis, and the Japanese tsunami.

But now, for the first time in recent memory, real storage costs will be
increasing rather than decreasing for a fairly prolonged period. Fortunately,
the knowledge required to resume the exponential curve after these floods
remains undamaged.

[1] Moore's Law for storage:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder#Kryder.27s_Law>

[2] Moore's law through 2011:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2011.svg)

~~~
Bjartr
Moore's and Kryder's law are about feasible storage/transistor fabrication
density increasing, not about whether or not those advances translate into
savings for the consumer.

------
jodrellblank
If you find yourself wanting a hard drive more now, than you did before
reading this, be aware of this effect:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/oz/scarcity/>

"""Scarcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become
more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

Buyers for supermarkets, told by a supplier that beef was in scarce supply,
gave orders for twice as much beef as buyers told it was readily available.
Buyers told that beef was in scarce supply, and furthermore, that the
information about scarcity was itself scarce - that the shortage was not
general knowledge - ordered six times as much beef. (Since the study was
conducted in a real-world context, the information provided was in fact
correct.) (Knishinsky 1982.)"""

~~~
jeffdavis
That doesn't seem like a flaw of human psychology; aside from perhaps
believing the researcher's lies.

If you normally buy a pound of beef per week, and you believe that the price
will be much higher next week, it's rational to buy extra and freeze it.

HDs are somewhat of a special case, because it's really just a supply
interruption. By the time I need another hard drive, the prices will probably
be back to normal or perhaps even lower. But it's still not irrational to
think: "should I try to get one of those while I can?".

~~~
jodrellblank
_But it's still not irrational to think: "should I try to get one of those
while I can?"_

If you have a use for one, you could think "is the current price still good
enough value for me", and if you have no use for one, then you could ignore
it.

It's when you have no specific use for one and weren't planning to buy one,
but now you're thinking "should I try to get one of those while I can?", that
it seems like a psychological flaw.

~~~
jeffdavis
"If you have a use for one, you could think "is the current price still good
enough value for me", and if you have no use for one, then you could ignore
it."

It's about the future, too. If you think that the value to you in 2 months
will exceed the price today, then it is rational to purchase it now (even if
the value to you today is zero). It becomes more urgent when you think that
the price in 2 months (when you need it) will be significantly higher.

Additionally, humans are risk-averse, and a known price today is less risky
than an unknown price in the future.

------
ck2
HD prices right now are reacting the same way gas pump prices go up when crude
does, even though their local tanks are full.

Quick to rise, slow to fall. The real crisis will be at the end of November.
But the market won't recover until next year.

Good for SSD I guess which already had falling prices.

ps. HD103SJ is a fantastic drive but bad for price comparisons since it almost
never went below $50 - Seagate also bought Samsung's HD division so who know
what is going to happen to those great drives now.

~~~
jeffdavis
"HD prices right now are reacting the same way gas pump prices go up when
crude does, even though their local tanks are full."

Isn't that what _should_ happen? When there is a supply interruption, then the
local inventory needs to last longer. The primary way to make that happen in a
market economy is for prices to rise.

~~~
Confusion
The inventory doesn't need to last longer: it needs to yield a higher margin,
because you're going to sell fewer units.

~~~
jeffdavis
It's meaningless to talk about what an individual seller "needs", because they
may get much more than they "need" or they may get much less than they "need".
In short, the sellers get what they can; regardless of what they "need".

I was using the word "need" loosely ("needs to last longer") to mean that it's
the economically desirable result for the population at large. If the limited
supply lasts longer, then it's still available to those who have the greatest
desire for the product (e.g. a company with disks failing in production).

The rising prices during a supply interruption seem to be the market working.
By that I don't mean it's perfect; I mean if you don't like prices to rise
when supply is interrupted, you probably don't like market economies at all.

------
shalmanese
Oddly enough, I just bought a 1 TB networked HD for $99:
[http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Home-
STAM1000...](http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Home-
STAM1000100/dp/B003SU4BXQ) which seems so far unaffected by the price
increases. This leads to the odd situation where it would be cheaper to buy
the enclosure, rip the hard drive out and throw the rest in the trash than to
buy a naked drive.

edit: even cheaper: [http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-External-
STAC...](http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-External-
STAC1000100/dp/B003ELOSIW/ref=sr_1_12?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1320573233&sr=1-12)
3TB for $132 compared to $250 for the naked drive.

~~~
uxp
You should note that most companies flag the serial numbers of the drives
inside bundled enclosures.

I had a 1TB WD MyBook I picked up some years ago, eventually installing the
drive in my tower some time later, and just under the 3 year warranty it
started failing. When looking into getting it replaced the drive's serial
number would always return the MyBook product, not the WD10EACS that was
inside it. If I was to return it, I would have to re-install it into the
enclosure, and make sure the "warranty is void if broken" sticker which I
naturally broke removing the drive, was unbroken. I've also seen similar with
Seagate FreeAgent bundled external drives.

------
abhaga
What are the chances that some news crunching system at a trading firm caught
up on this development and predicted the up side on the Seagate stock? I am
interested from the technology point of view. Do we have deployed systems that
are able to pick up on such connections?

~~~
QuoVadis7
I've heard of a trading company doing something like this: they parse
Bloomberg's news stream for keywords and place orders accordingly.

Not sure they'd be able to connect flood in Taiwan with, say, Seagate stock
based on Seagate NOT having plants in TW. Shorting stocks of the companies in
electronics industry or some index like NASDAQ is feasible, though.

~~~
gujk
That is simple to implement. All industry members in Thailand (not Taiwan)
take a hit. All competitors to companies that take a hit get a bonus.

------
jakarta
Yeah, the supply chain took a pretty decent hit with Western Digital (they
make about a third of the market's HDs and are saying production will be 50%
lower than usual on their end).

Supply / demand is pretty slanted and it will take probably take while for
things to work themselves out:

HDD Demand: 180 mm units HDD Supply: 130 mm units

That's the big downside to having these lean supply chains, a slight hit to
one manufacturing site can have a big effect globally.

~~~
sirn
Apart from the direct hit, there's also indirect hit by suspension of NIDEC
factories (which NIDEC itself supplies 80% of hard drive motors[1]) which has
at least five factories located in the flooded area.

[1]: <http://seekingalpha.com/article/220546>

------
lsc
I probably average spending around six hundred dollars a month on hard drives,
before the price hike, so I've been watching this closely.

what I found interesting was that prices shot up almost immediately if you buy
on line or through a distribution channel, but at Fry's? it took over a week,
and even now, prices are lower at Fry's than at newegg, if fry's has stock.

That's the kicker; 'enterprise' stock at Fry's is hit or miss at the best of
times.

On the other hand, Fry's quickly started getting serious about the 'limit X' -
normally, if you want ten hard drives marked "limit 2" you ask a sales person,
and they print you out five quotes. You take it to the front and get your ten
drives. Not anymore. Now they actually limit you to the limit.

I was able to buy enough 2tb RE4 drives to hopefully carry me through the end
of the year.

The other thing I did right away was test my stash of used and questionable
drives, and return the bad ones. That's another 10 or 15 drives right there,
The testing took a period of days (and I returned bad drives as I found them)
- the replacements are trickling back, and it looks like all of them, at this
point, are in the mail. But if this behavior was common, e.g. people that had
large stashes of broken drives laying about that they returned all at once
when news of the shortage hit? I can only imagine that the stresses on their
stock for warranty returns are making the problem worse.

Oh, also note, I have some 3tb, 7200rpm 'consumer grade' drives (hatachi and
seagate) new, sealed, that I bought for a storage project that is suddenly
looking not as realistic. I'd be willing to trade them for 'enterprise' drives
of smaller capacities; contact me if you have 500g 'raid edition' drives or
similar and want to trade.

------
adestefan
Part of the problem is the actual damage and supply chain shortages, the other
part is people overreact and then make a run on the devices that are in short
supply. If you follow some of the hardcore system builder and tweaker forums
people are going into local shops and clearing the shelves for no reason at
all.

~~~
Confusion
For individuals that need the drives, there's a pretty good reason: others are
doing it anyway. Once you take that into account, game theory says you should
deviate from the globally optimal strategy as well.

------
SoftwareMaven
There has been little question SSDs are the next wave in 40 years of storage
disruption. The floods seems to come at a particularly bad time in the
disruption cycle, as SSDs are just getting closer to mainstream capacities and
costs.

SSD manufactures could use this to put a large nail in the HDD casket. Drop
prices so the difference in cost per GB is less and start up a big marketing
effort.

------
wazoox
Professional hard drives are almost impossible to find, at any price. The
price for the highest-end (therefore most demanded by capacity hungry
customers) 3 TB pro drives went up more than 100%, and there aren't available
anywhere anyway.

I have just enough stock to ship customers until end of November (a couple
hundred terabytes) then...

~~~
ars
If you have a shortage, raise the price until you don't.

~~~
wazoox
Unfortunately most of what's in stock has been already sold at the previous
price. And we're selling new equipment, so most customers will simply delay
investment until the price goes back to the normal trend.

------
math_is_life
I just beat the prices because 3 months ago I bought a 2TB HDD from Amazon for
$85 and now it is at $150 for a new one
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004VFJ9MK> and I got my little brother a
HDD for $65 and that one is $125 now
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00461LT6S>

------
wr1472
Pace microtechnology, one of the worlds largest set-top box & satellite tv
receiver manufacturers, released a market statement revising their profits
downward due to the flooding. They use western digital HDDs in their boxes.
<http://investegate.co.uk/Article.aspx?id=201110200700235290Q>

------
ashconnor
Floods in Thailand have closed several major factories that manufacture hard
drive disks.

Pathum Thani, where these factories are, was hit hard by the floods.

------
mgkimsal
Our local compusa story has signs all over the door saying "only one hard
drive per person per day". I figured it must have been some disaster shut down
some factories. Their prices are still _relatively_ cheap, but as their
supplies go down I suspect the prices will creep up.

------
sunyc
where do you guys get which harddrive performs better?

~~~
Terretta
Tom's Hardware, Anandtech.

------
marcf
I haven't noticed SSD prices go up though.

~~~
forgotusername
One might hope the increased cost of mechanical disks will increase demand for
SSDs, shortening the time for SSD costs to drop enough to be competitive with
the older technology.

SSD prices also might not be affected at all by these floods: the fabrication
process for silicon is almost certainly completely different to that for
magnetic drives, and likely to happen in completely different factories (in
other locations not dependent on the local resources that attract
manufacturers to build magnetic fabs in Thailand).

------
aneth
According to this pricing, 1, 1.5, and 2 Tb drives are all within $5 of each
other - $140, $139.50, and $144 respectively.

~~~
ohashi
Yeah I noticed that too, which makes me think, why would I ever buy the 1TB
drive when 1.5 is CHEAPER? And $4.50 more for another 500GB? Probably taking
that deal.

~~~
lukeschlather
Higher bit density from the same manufacturer at a similar price suggests a
less reliable drive.

~~~
jodrellblank
Or that the smaller one is older and you're paying a price for that niche
effect. (e.g. at the very low end, you can't get a 20Gb disk for $0.99, what
you typically get (not right now though) is a large range of sizes, say 160Gb
to 1TB, all within a few dollars).

1TB drives were first announced in Jan 2007, nearly 5 years ago, is that long
enough to push them out of the main manufacturing effort?

~~~
wmf
New 1 TB models just came out, so obsolescence doesn't explain the pricing.

~~~
wtallis
The new drives you're talking about are probably 1TB single-platter drives,
which would have different pricing dynamics from 1TB three-platter drives.

