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HDD prices are terrible
Forget trying to build a new PC right now. The HDD alone will be as much as a good midrange video card now. I guess they need to move the plants to China, at least they wont be affected by flooding there. This sucks bad. What use to cost $80 a couple months ago is now over $200. Should just say screw it and get a 500+ GB ssd for over $1000. Terrible that this has to happen at the end of the year right when everything is starting to drop in price.
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Yeah it kind of sucks. Hopefully they get chugging again soon though!
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Weird, I wonder why they came up recently like that? I just bought some 3TB WD drives about 6 weeks ago for a NAS - just looked them up agin and they are up 80-100%. Yikes! Even sadder thing is I sold a bunch of 2TB drives in great condition for around $60 at the same time
EDIT: I see this is from Thailand floods. Never realized most drives were made there, figured they were made in China like 99% of everything else in the world!
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The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
Massive flood in Thailand destroyed the western digital plant... Ever since there has been a massive HDD shortage which caused a hike in prices. SSD's are the same price though since Intel and OCZ lead the market for them.
SSD's are all I use on my desktop systems - but I have a ton of spinning hard disks in NAS storage devices.
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
Yeah me to, I thought perhaps they would of been made in China most of them but they aren't. I read further info on all this and it seems they are forecasting the HDD prices to continue to climb for the next couple months then another six months till they start to decline and eventually even out. That is only if there is no further issues.
This is the worst time for new pc builders cause of these prices. A 500gb drive will soon climb past 250 and perhaps into $300 range. A ssd drive of the same size 500gb range is over $1000, so consumers looking for large storage space will shell out for the regular hdd over ssd if they are only using them for mass storage. I am thinking of going to a 256gb ssd drive for my games and a 64gb ssd for the OS on my new build. No way I am paying 100-200% increase on a regular hdd.
Or you could just discover that you don't need as much storage capacity as you thought you did, and then go SSD only.
I've got a 120 GB SSD and no hard drive.
I do a lot of video editing and various large format video projects. Not including FRAPs at HD videos from various online games. If you download a lot of games and use steam a lot you need a large amount space. 500GB is still not enough. I guess the consumer knows specifically what there needs are.
Which NAS are you using?
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https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
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I agree its terrible how dare them to be affected by a natural disaster right when you plan to build a new rig they really should have planned that better and take that into consideration.
Come on guys seriously you are whining about HDD prizes going up as a result to a natural disater? There really isnt anything else that could be more important right now??
You could just use your old HDD for now and get a new one once the market settled down again and recovered from this blow.
Nothing should stop you right now to get all other parts already you wanna get so this "problem" really isnt any problem at all. Some ppls really should get there priorities right!!
Stuff like this happens, it was the same with memory after Fukushima and the tsunami.
A few countries make most of the hardware, the prices of monitors would go up if something happened in South Korea as well.
Still, just reuse your old harddrive at the time when you build a new computer, or wait a few months.
As far as I know is SSD prices not so badly affected and you want those for the main drive anyways, waiting a few months for a larger media drive is no biggie even if you must get a new computer now (for TOR or Skyrim).
And old harddrives last a long time if they don't get too hot.
A good alternative for media drives is to get one of those nice adapters that deltaco makes, you put in to the E-sata or USB port and can slot in your small drives into it and use old drives more or less like a huge flashdrive. Great if you have a bunch smaller old SATA drives at home like me.
Aside from WD, the HDD makers are probably crying tears of joy from this. HDD prices have been obscenely low for the last while, it's actually amazing that one or more haven't just given up.
When you think that even the lowest HDD involves a bunch of metal disks spinning at circular saw speeds (or faster), with a tiny reader arm hovering over it at a distance measured in micrometers, reading and writing millions of bytes to and from the aforementioned spinning disks, plus a controller chip and onboard cache memory, all with near-zero error tolerance, all at a volume well below conversation levels - and some of these things were selling for less than it costs to take a family out for a fast-food dinner?
If the HDD makers are smart, they'll use this situation to reestablish a more profitable priceline over the long-term. Unless they go and cut each other's throats again, of course.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
That was definitely an eye popping experience to go look at the current prices (even looking at some of the out of the way places that deal in refurbs). Was so used to getting all the emails from various vendors with ludicrous cheap prices, kind of took it for granted.
To see drives with 1/4th to 1/8th the capacity going for 2-3 times the price . . . dayum.
Though, oddly enough - I noticed that the price of RAM came down...almost half of what I had been looking at (DDR2 for older systems).
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
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If Hsinchu, Taiwan gets hit hard, it could completely wipe out GPU construction for both Nvidia and AMD, with only the exception of AMD's Llano integrated graphics. Now that would be scary. Because you don't really need a hard drive.
Yeah I agree. And another poster quoted me and said basically I as the consumer should not be complaining about this because it's a natural disaster. That is the point I wanted to make, that these companies need to have more then one fabrication area in-case of something happening, it can actually cause them to go out of business because of it. The world demands hardware, it can't live without it. I have a right to complain about this, it is dumb that they only fab it in this area. They have to spread out all over to keep production up.
What about hospitals and businesses that depend on large drives. So as consumers we have to pay 4x for a old drive technology. Prices were cheap on them because they are easy to make, all done by robots basically and ssd tech is taking off. So yeah I can complain if I want.
It costs several billion dollars to build a fab. Doubling that for reliability reasons is just too expensive. That's why there are so few cutting-edge fabs. Intel is the only company in the world with sufficient volume that it makes sense to maintain fabs for their own products, at least for logic chips rather than simpler stuff like DRAM or NAND flash.
Rumors say that AMD may soon make some of their GPU chips at Global Foundries, rather than TSMC. But if so, even that will only be something like a 7800 series card at TSMC and a 7900 series card at Global Foundries.
I use Synology NAS's. I have a DS209 running RAID1 and then a larger DS1010 running RAID6 for storing multimedia. Great and affordable systems too!
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
Bet on the latter. HD manufacturers can afford to make next to no profit on consumer models, they make up for it in large OEM Bulk contracts and hefty premiums on near-identical "enterprise" class hardware.
Sure they are very intricate and delicate devices, but that's the amazing thing about mass production and economy of scale: it can all be made manageable if you can drive the sales numbers up.
I'm switching over to SSDs now anyway and I'd advise everyone else to do so. With the price of a 512 GB drive almost £1.10 ($1.60) a GB and HDD prices soaring it's time for the serious gamer to take the plunge!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
$1.60 a GB? It's closer to 20-30 cents a GB for that 500GB (50 cents to $1 for the 80-160GB, 15 cents for the terras).
The problem for some is that it was closer to 5 cents a GB before the floods.
SSDs on the other hand, are still $2+ a GB.
So sure, if you're just looking at a system drive... but for storage...
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
The prices I gave were for SSDs CLICK I think Kingston SSDs sell for smoething like $1.20 per GB right now and these are Sata 3 drives with decent controlers. The next part everyone who upgrades should be saving up for is an SSD.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
Ah, I misread that. I'd never dream of spending $750-800 on a hard drive at home, lol - thus why I thought you were talking about SATA drives. Thus the reason that I included the higher $/GB for the smaller drives.
That $808 Crucial is available for $750 from Newegg, but it is out of stock.
Just could not imagine $750-800+ for a 512GB, when not long ago - 1-2TBs were available for $50-100 with promo codes, etc.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
I bought myself a 256GB Crucial M4 for £290 which is just over $400, since my present HDD uses less than 210GB of space and after transfering files for storage to my old HDD and deleting crap I haven't used in years I should be using less than half of that.
You know you want to do it!!!!!!!!!
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"
CS Lewis
I have an 80GB system drive, 2x 250GB - and an external 250GB drive for storage. I had been thinking about replacing the storage drives and getting 64-128GB SSD for a system drive. At this point, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that nothing tanks...lol.
I miss the MMORPG genre. Will a developer ever make one again?
Explorer: 87%, Killer: 67%, Achiever: 27%, Socializer: 20%
One article I read mentioned the real reason behind the price increases, because of the shortage they are increasing the cost of HDDs bought as seperate components to reduce demand. They are doing this to try and ensure they supply to OEMs and system manufacturors
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Havent seen the rpice hikes happen in the UK seems we may have a massive overstock of them, even if we do I only use SSD's in systems at present and external HD's are cheap as chips at places like Argos etc that cant put the price up.