Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > Hard Drive Prices

reply to prairiesky

Re: Hard Drive Prices

reply to Ken Peterson

reply to Ken Peterson

reply to Kramer
Common occurrence. Back in the day, the slightest tremor in Taiwan would cause RAM prices to triple overnight. Small guys like me immediately raised my prices on existing inventory so as not to get screwed when the eventually prices fell on inventory I had to buy at the higher prices. I tried not to gouge, just didn't want to lose anything. If I had to sell some items at cost occasionally, I would but refused to loose coins.

I try now to keep inventory as small as possible because of such things but still need to stock inventory for warranty repairs. Almost slit my wrists when I paid close to $100 for a 500 gig drive last week.

reply to Kramer
Actually Amazon.com has had some decent deals the last few days that I checked:

1) Seagate Expansion 2.0 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive ST320005EXA101-RK for $89.99

2) Western Digital WD Elements 2 TB USB 2.0 Desktop External Hard Drive $113.99

and so on,....

For my purposes I would either use them as USB HDDs or remove them from their OEM enclosures for internal use.

reply to Kramer
Jesus.. the prices for like simple 1TB drives are like at the levels 3TB drives are before this flooding..

I have no cable tv.. Did this flooding happen last week or something? I'm going to have to check Amazon.

The flooding in Thailand has existed for weeks I think, it has been steadily increasing, something like 1/2 of the country is under water. Much of Asia has gotten rain beyond the norm, The Philippines has had some many typhoons and tropical storms, only something like a day separated two of them for the poor beautiful people of Luzon.

»www.google.com/search?q=floods+i···irefox-a

There will end up being a lot more deaths due to dengue and malaria, as the poor have nowhere to go and with flood waters come mosquitos. My family in the Phils had a neighbor's son die from dengue recently. I got it when I was there and a day after I got back from being there I was bed ridden for 3 weeks with a fever almost that entire time, dengue is horrible. If you are poor, malnourished, can't get clean water, unless you're young and hearty, you're gonna die.

As bad as this storm in CT just was, and me being without power for 8 days, internet for 9, this is paradise here compared to much of Asia.

Thailand will remain flooded for weeks, it will take a long time for the flood water to recede. Imagine, something like 1/2 the country I think. And I thought the floods in TN when I was there were bad.
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Join Teams Helix and Discovery. Rest in Peace, Leonard David Smith, my best friend, you are missed badly! Rest in peace, Pop, glad our last years were good. Please pray for Colin, he has ependymoma, a brain cancer, donate to a children's Hospital.

Wow this is bad

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flood···2011.jpg

It sucks.. So what should I do? buy a bunch of smaller SSD's or what?

Upcoming build

Rock meet hard place then,….

What are you building if you don’t mind my asking (planned hardware configuration I mean),…?

If you look around you might find something though. Like I said earlier I found a few 2TB USB HDDs at their previously uninflected price (about ~$89.99 to ~$113.99). If you find a deal like that you can just remove the outer casing and install it as an internal SATA HDD. The problem with doing that is you may void your warranty, which, could be an issue if it fails within the warranty period.

If you want a very specific HDD make / model then you will probably just have to pay the going rate. If you feel like you can get buy with just an SSD then it might be worth a shot in the short term.

It's nothing crazy as far as the build very basic 1155 i5 system.

I might have to go the external hdd way.. 2TB is about $130.. the internal versions are like $200...

However I don't think I would see much improvement over what drives I have now. Only when I get the SSD.

The WD externals are usually a safe bet. The 1, 2, and 3Tb *usually* have green series drives in them. You just have to keep in mind that removing them from the enclosure voids the warranty. Stick with the USB 3.0 capable models, so far all of them I've opened have SATA III drives inside.

I just picked up some of the 3Tb WD My Books for $130, though you would probably need to buy a controller card to run them SATA.

I was just going to ask about that.. I was wondering if the drives inside are they SATA?

reply to Kramer
i just bagged 4x wd green 3tb drives for $400 shipped off ebay. even at before flood prices i got a deal

reply to Camelot One
As you mentioned, on the older drives there's a normal looking SATA drive inside the enclosure and then a bridge adapter that converted the standard SATA connector into USB that the user sees.

On some of the newer drives, the SATA to USB bridging is actually all done on the drive's PCB. So, when you open up the enclosure all you're going to see is a HDD with a USB connection. The drive's still built based off the standard SATA drive, but because the bridging is all done on the PCB there's no more standard SATA connection available to the user if they wanted to take the drive out of the enclosure.

If you google it, there are actually some tutorials showing how to solder a SATA cable on to certain pins of the PCB and connect to it via SATA, but it's probably easier just to buy a regular SATA drive in the first place

Considering the USB drives are still using the same drives internally, it's really surprising their prices haven't skyrocketed too.

reply to Kramer
As expected, other areas of the industry are being effected:

More industry fallout from the flooding in Thailand

quote:

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With HDD shortages come a reduced demand for most PC components as shipping a system without a hard drive tends to be frowned upon. This will be hitting motherboard makers fairly hard over the last quarter of 2011. DigiTimes reports an estimated 20% drop for Gigabyte; MSI, ECS and ASRock are expecting around a 10% decrease and ASUS projects somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5-10%. We can certainly hope that there will be discounts offered in the attempt to focus on upgraders. A nice price on some of the new motherboards that have just come onto the market might draw the attention of those who already have a fully functional PC but are considering a possible hardware refresh.

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This part is good for me but it's like the cheapest thing in the build

reply to Octavean
This could mean the death of yet another motherboard maker. Will someone like ASrock go the way of Abit, DFI, and IWill? All three were leaders, ASrock is a follower.