Why are mechanical hard drives still so goddamn expensive?
Back in late 2011 we had the Malaysia flooding which effected HD prices. Right as that was happening I drove all over town, and bought out the last 4 WD Greens for sale at $59.99 each from Best Buy. Everyone else had already tripled their HD prices. The prices never came back down to preflood prices, and inflation only accounts for less than $5. Right now the exact same 2TB WD Green EARS is $105 on Newegg. Almost twice as much as what I paid for it 5+ years ago.
I am currently running low on space, and I need to upgrade my RAID setup. A decent 4TB HD is $150+ A decent 8TB HD is $300+ Both of these have high infant death rates which makes me wary about buying a new HD right now.
Price per GB has not gone down at all since the flooding. The cheapest 2TB right now is still $10 more than what I paid for it years ago.
Even on eBay people are selling used HDs at 80% of their original value.
SSDs are getting cheap, and cheaper, but mechanical drives dont seem to be effected by them. 1 TB SSD is still 4x the price of a 1TB mechanical, but the gap is closing. When will they start competing? What is a reliable drive to buy right now? Has cloud storage had any effect on consumer drives? Will prices ever start coming down?
>Price per GB has not gone down at all since the flooding I'm quite certain that prices went up since that flooding. Not per GB, but regarding flagship drives the launch day msrp are way up.
Bentley Carter
>SSDs are getting cheap, and cheaper No they are not. Samsung is refusing to invest in increased capacity for their fabs. They are forcing an artificially low supply on products that sell like hot cakes (3d nand) to keep upward pressure on the price trends.
Not even intel nor nvidia are THAT jew.
Jose Butler
This. Competition has cratered even since 2011. Samsung, Hitachi and Fujitsu have been bought out. You've basically god a duopoly between Western Digital and Seagate. Neither of them have any incentive to compete with each other by dropping prices
Juan Harris
I really wanna boycott them, but their nvme drives are indeed uncontested while their sata ssd's aren't exactly inarguably the best for every scenario they always figure on the top (or upper) position for every chart. Would'v'e been an easy pick if not for their retarded prices.
Jace Young
and that's the worst part, since this not a black swan event (like the flooding) and considering , I don't have high hopes to see lower pricing for the mid-term.
Kevin Howard
>Back in late 2011 we had the Malaysia flooding which effected HD prices. Actually it was Thailand. Having set your credibility level to 0, let's proceed.
Brody Flores
...
Eli Richardson
Thailand, Malaysia. same difference
Joseph Anderson
I imagine what happened is that the corporations found that people were still willing to buy hdd's at the sameish rate despite the price increase from the crisis.
So the manufactures just kept the price up even after the crisis ended.
