HDD Prices Not Predicted to Return to Normal Until 2014

[TBoneit]

Not really sure this belongs here since drive prices impact all aspects.

http://www.dailytech.com/HDD+Prices+Not+Predicted+to+Return+to+Normal+Until+2014/article24900.htm

prices will remain high until 2014 thanks to long-term agreements between computer makers and hard drive makers

[jman98]

It's a fantastic time to get into SSDs if that works for anybody. Prices are currently less than half of what they were in January 2011. Of course you don't have the same kind of storage in SSDs that you do in hard drives, but still, if you've ever thought about getting one and trying it out, now is a great time. SSD prices have not in any way been influenced by the flooding that is still being used as an excuse for hard drive prices going up.

[TBoneit]

All my computers and the one I built for my Brother have SSD boot drives with the non laptop computers having 7200RPM data drives.

120Gb, 160Gb and one 300Gb. All Intel SSDs.

I love the way they speed up booting and shutting down. Applications loading and Malware scans as well as Security updates.

They have no impact on encodes of video material but then I didn't' expect that to be a benefit.

However the majority of what I do they help.

[cal_tony]

I've thought about getting one for a while. Think I'll get one now. Any suggestions on what to get? 120 to 160gb would works for me.

A short while ago there was a thread here re: the lowering of HD prices. I looked online line but didn't much of a price drop on anything.

2 years ago the discounted price(fathers day, mothers day,any day you could name... just about) You could get the Seagate 5900 2 tb drive for $59.00.. Now it's the 500 gb at that price.

Tony

[TBoneit]

This is a opinion, but I bought mostly Intel SSDs, the ones with the 5 year warranty, 320 Series for SATA II and their 520 Series for SATA III. Along with Samsung, a Kingston and a pain in the neck to get setup OCZ Vertex 3. The Intel SSD drives I was able to use the Intel free cloning software and they just work.

[fritzi93]

Yeah, SSDs are getting to be significantly lower than $1/GB. If you watch NewEgg for promos that is.

Anyway, mechanical hard drive prices aren't quite so bad now. I recently got a SpinPoint 2 TB for $100 bucks. Still about $30 more than a year ago, but tolerable.

[yoda313]

storage in SSDs that you do in hard drives

I have a semantics question here - isn't an ssd still a hard drive? Or is it just a technicality since it doesn't have moving parts?

Is this like people still saying "rewind" instead of "reverse" or "tape" instead of "record"? Meaning old habits die hard but mean the same thing? (referring to using the "archaic" terms for digital mediums like streaming or dvr'ing or disc/file playback)

[dragonkeeper]

Anyway, mechanical hard drive prices aren't quite so bad now. I recently got a SpinPoint 2 TB for $100 bucks. Still about $30 more than a year ago, but tolerable.

$30 Tolerable? Your pockets must be much deeper than mine. I was poised to buy 20 2TB drives prior to the flood, but i am now in a holding pattern to pull the trigger on the purchase of the drives. Although prices have come down significantly since the floods their is still a significant price bump when buying that many drives even i were to get the drives @100 instead of the normal price of $120 that is a price increase of $400 which i can't justify.

[fritzi93]

Okay, maybe poor choice of words. A hundred bucks though is a lot better than $200 plus; I was stunned how quickly and by how much NewEgg jacked up prices when the flood news came out. And there were predictions all over on tech sites that prices would stay at such elevated levels for a year or more. Thankfully, that was overly pessimistic.

[TBoneit]

storage in SSDs that you do in hard drives

I have a semantics question here - isn't an ssd still a hard drive? Or is it just a technicality since it doesn't have moving parts?

Is this like people still saying "rewind" instead of "reverse" or "tape" instead of "record"? Meaning old habits die hard but mean the same thing? (referring to using the "archaic" terms for digital mediums like streaming or dvr'ing or disc/file playback)

I never really thought about. I say SSD for Solid State Drive and I say Hard Drive for drives that have spinning platters for storage. I do not know if there is a consensus. It just seems a little silly to me to say SSD Hard Drive and Spinning Platter hard drive for the other.

[dragonkeeper]

I concur SSD "Solid State Drive" implies a hard drive. But more importantly is use to differentiate the type of hard drive

[dragonkeeper]

Okay, maybe poor choice of words. A hundred bucks though is a lot better than $200 plus; I was stunned how quickly and by how much NewEgg jacked up prices when the flood news came out.

I was as well. I was on line the day before they jacked the prices and had picked out the drives I wanted. I started to feel anxious about making the $1600 purchase and decided to wait for a sell. At work the next day i hard about the expected increase in hard drive prices, I rushed to get online to make my purchase and to my horror Newegg had already raised the prices significantly.

Another case of you snooze you loose, or as i like to say another life's lesson from my friend Murphy hence my sig.

[zoobie]

use quotes when you use the word "flooding"

[jagabo]

use quotes when you use the word "flooding"

Yeah, there were no floods in Thailand. It was all faked. Just like the moon landings.

[jman98]

use quotes when you use the word "flooding"

Yeah, there were no floods in Thailand. It was all faked. Just like the moon landings.

Indeed. As someone who was in Asia during the floods but not in Thailand itself, I can personally testify that I saw plenty of images of the flooding on TV at the time and it was quite real. Perhaps Zoobie is really trying to express doubt on the flooding being the true cause for the price increase, but the floods themselves were very real.

For what it's worth, I'm using a Crucial 256 GB SSD and even though I paid $500 for it in Jan. 2011, I still think it was worth it. I'm really sold on the technology.

[jagabo]

use quotes when you use the word "flooding"

Yeah, there were no floods in Thailand. It was all faked. Just like the moon landings.

Indeed. As someone who was in Asia during the floods but not in Thailand itself, I can personally testify that I saw plenty of images of the flooding on TV at the time and it was quite real.

Then it was the drive manufacturers that caused it. Just for an excuse to raise prices!

[zoobie]

Perhaps Zoobie is really trying to express doubt on the flooding being the true cause for the price increase...

Exactly jman...It's the mfg's excuse...horrible "flooding" of warehouses, etc. Nowadays, someone will always find a way to profit from a disaster.

A buddy actually went to Thailand during the floods. I'm still laughing...at him...not the floods

[Constant Gardener]

WD and Seagate have done well financially from the flooding. Regardless, if prices are back on track in 2014, a dual-platter, 8 TB drive should cost about $70.

[yoda313]

I never really thought about. I say SSD for Solid State Drive and I say Hard Drive for drives that have spinning platters for storage. I do not know if there is a consensus. It just seems a little silly to me to say SSD Hard Drive and Spinning Platter hard drive for the other.

That would make sense. I guess its repetitive to say ssd hard drive but for everyday purposes in my mind its still a harddrive.

I guess its like calling all cellphones a cellphone rather than a smartphone or "wireless" or something like that. It might not be on the cellular technology but everybody would understand what you are saying if you just say "cellphone".

I concur SSD "Solid State Drive" implies a hard drive. But more importantly is use to differentiate the type of hard drive

I can live with that. I just didn't want to think it was significantly different to be outside of the normal classification.

[dragonkeeper]

Perhaps Zoobie is really trying to express doubt on the flooding being the true cause for the price increase.

Indeed. I find it hard to believe the manufactures did not learn from the mistake of the memory manufactures made in the late 90's when the earthquakes hit japan and memory prices sky rocketed.

[alegator]

With that kind of time frame I'd better wait for 1Tb Thunderbolt Flash Drives!

[lacywest]

Well ... Last February ... of 2011 ... a Seagate Tera Byte cost 80 Bucks ... not no more ... I'm running out of room on my system.

I'm going to my back shelf and getting out some of my old PATA drives and hooking up one of those PATA to USB 2.0 connectors to the back of these drives and I've got a molex power supply sticking out from my tower and just laying these drives on my work table to transfer stuff.
These drives are old ... so as soon as I get some stuff off ... I disconnect it and put it off to the side ... I leave these drives connected too long ... my luck ... the drive will fail ... so far nothing has gone wrong. Just a bunch of 80GBs and 120GBs ... sitting around.

[jman98]

I get where you guys are coming from in terminology, but
1) You're wrong (and I'll explain why shortly)
2) You fail to realize that what you are proposing is essentially insane.

Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
This definition makes it clear that SSDs are NOT hard drives. This is why you are wrong.

Really, does it even make sense to consider SSDs to be hard drives? Because now you open the door to the following, which is just crazy - You can start saying "SSD hard drives" instead of "SSDs". OK. If that works for you, OK. But what the heck do you call a non-SSD hard drive? "Non-SSD hard drive"? "Platter based hard drive"? How is that honestly better than just saying SSDs for SSDs and hard drives for devices that use platters? Some of you are trying to be too clever and too pedantic here. SSDs don't have moving parts and hard drives do. It's really just that simple.

[usually_quiet]

I get where you guys are coming from in terminology, but
1) You're wrong (and I'll explain why shortly)
2) You fail to realize that what you are proposing is essentially insane.

Take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
This definition makes it clear that SSDs are NOT hard drives. This is why you are wrong.

Really, does it even make sense to consider SSDs to be hard drives? Because now you open the door to the following, which is just crazy - You can start saying "SSD hard drives" instead of "SSDs". OK. If that works for you, OK. But what the heck do you call a non-SSD hard drive? "Non-SSD hard drive"? "Platter based hard drive"? How is that honestly better than just saying SSDs for SSDs and hard drives for devices that use platters? Some of you are trying to be too clever and too pedantic here. SSDs don't have moving parts and hard drives do. It's really just that simple.

I agree. Think about the reasoning behind the terms for the different older drive types. There were three common disk drive types FDD (floppy disk drive), ODD (optical disk drive) and HDD (hard disk drive). Floppy disk drive is often shortened to "floppy drive", hard disk drive to "hard drive", and optical disk drive to "optical drive". The "hard" in hard drive describes the rigid disk (or platter) in a hard disk drive, distinguishing it from the other two types of disk drives.

SSD = solid state drive, with no disk. So, tecnically speaking, an SSD isn't a hard drive, since there are no platters. The confusion comes from retailers listing SSDs in the HDD section of their catalogs since SSDs replace HDDs.

[Constant Gardener]

Tape, disc, and optical drives imply some sort of motion, but now we have jump drives (the non-FTL kind) and SSDs that have no moving parts, yet the term "drive" continues. It's just definition creep; after all, we still dial touch-tone phones, and some of us sound like broken records.

Meanwhile, I just bought a 2 TB two-platter Seagate drive for $100. There is hope.

[yoda313]

It's just definition creep

I like that phrase.

I think as long as everyone knows what you are talking about that is the important thing. It might not be technically accurate but as long as the idea is conveyed than that is what matters.

[usually_quiet]

I think as long as everyone knows what you are talking about that is the important thing. It might not be technically accurate but as long as the idea is conveyed than that is what matters.

That's the whole problem. If I said "Get me a 2.5-inch hard drive", or "Get me a laptop hard drive", I doubt that many people would automatically think I meant an SSD instead of an HDD unless I specifically said I wanted an SSD.

[usually_quiet]

Tape, disc, and optical drives imply some sort of motion, but now we have jump drives (the non-FTL kind) and SSDs that have no moving parts, yet the term "drive" continues. It's just definition creep; after all, we still dial touch-tone phones, and some of us sound like broken records.

Meanwhile, I just bought a 2 TB two-platter Seagate drive for $100. There is hope.

Even an SSD or flash drive moves something, data, although there are no physical moving parts.

[hello_hello]

Even an SSD or flash drive moves something, data, although there are no physical moving parts.

Almost every PC component moves data. RAM, CPU, optical drives.... I'm just trying to understand the point you're making.

[yoda313]

That's the whole problem. If I said "Get me a 2.5-inch hard drive", or "Get me a laptop hard drive", I doubt that many people would automatically think I meant an SSD instead of an HDD unless I specifically said I wanted an SSD.

Ahh but thats where it gets more interesting. How many "tech" people would trust this stuff to non tech people? I mean some times you have to for work or whatever but if its your personal stuff are you gonna rely on a neighbor who still thinks 8 tracks are modern? - edit - sorry just reread more closely and I do see what you are getting at now - but you would have the same problem if you don't mention pata or sata for a platter drive - unless they know you have a modern computer you might still need pata.

I know what a ssd is but my whole thing on this discussion was the terminology aspect.

I do understand they are significantly different than platter harddrives but they still do the same thing - store data.

I guess I'm being a bit contradicting if I hold fast to using the digital terms for video playback (except rewind - I guess I'll never stop saying it - but I'm always saying "record" instead of "tape). I don't really mean to be difficult on this but the whole thing about language is communication. If you and I know what we are talking about than we are communicating properly.