FYI - Hard drive price hikes

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g1nganinja

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All,

I sadly work in IT, and just as a note for you all that dont, there were some severe floods in far east recently which decimated the world largest disk manufacturing plants and will take many many months to get them cleared up and running again - NET RESULT - MASSIVE price increases on ALL hard drives are now being passed on to ALL System manufacturers and the availability of hard drives is teh wqorse i have known it to be in last 20 years.

I would suggest therefore snap up deals while you can and dont put it off until new year expecting prices to drop - they wont - they will increase.

PS - I dont sell hard drives and dont have a huge stoickpile to cash in on either sadly !
 
Prices rose weeks ago so not really any deals to be had now.
 
Pretty old news now if your in IT..?

Anyone swapping to SSD's instead...

120GB ones sensible price now, we just have the problem where I work our image is getting pretty big.
 
HP and EMC have announced that their prices will go up on the 12th of January. The true price increases are only just hitting home (even though the floods were weeks ago).

So the price rises in consumer stuff are actually retailers and suppliers profiteering in advance!

I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't have a mutli petabyte platform to deliver in the new year and at that scale SSD just isn't an option. I am waiting to find out not just how much it's going to cost extra but even (because of the sheer volume of drives), if my suppliers can even provide them at all.
 
We've stopped ordering traditional HDD for in-house laptops... at current prices/availability, it's more sensible to use SSD for the primary drive. Problem is, if you start going for larger size the prices start getting prohibitive...

M.
 
I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't have a mutli petabyte platform to deliver in the new year

Do you work for a storage company? A couple of us on the forum do..

Internally we've just gone to 160GB SSD's - and are encouraging users to keep as much data as possible serverside rather than client side.

Hopefully it'll prevent people using corporate laptops to store their personal music, video's and photo's.
 
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Just got an 80GB HDD (SATA, used) for the computer I'm using. Cost just £6.95. If you go used, they are very cheap.

Got tons of used 4GB hdds from 1998 2 years ago, all still work fine. Use them to install OSs on (and a second HDD in each computer, much newer, for personal files etc.)
 
HP and EMC have announced that their prices will go up on the 12th of January. The true price increases are only just hitting home (even though the floods were weeks ago).

So the price rises in consumer stuff are actually retailers and suppliers profiteering in advance!

I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't have a mutli petabyte platform to deliver in the new year and at that scale SSD just isn't an option. I am waiting to find out not just how much it's going to cost extra but even (because of the sheer volume of drives), if my suppliers can even provide them at all.


As you rightly say Mark price hikes are only just starting to hit the beleagured high street - which is why i stated - for those that DONT work in IT !!!!

netapp set to announce their hikes and HDS also shortly, i find it even more funnily coincidental that both WD and Seagate announced reductions in their warranty periods over last couple of weeks too ! :p

Multi petabyte for new year Mark?? Sounds like a rejustification to the board based on extenuating circumstances.....this caffufle will no doubt see the rise of arguments for proper HSM.....the storage nirvana for hetrogenous systems......!
 
As others have said, this is very old news now. Prices will likely start to fall again. Hard drive prices slide as Thai flood aftermath subsides - Computerworld

This is true to a slight extent Rory, what is being forgotten, is the latent effect of the floods and the increases in raw costs which will continue to keep prices infalted of their own accord, let alone the massive backlog that has to be filled, and also that whilst HDD manufacturing fabs can get back up to speed quicker than a silicon fab, it still takes weeks/months and therefore the vendors (be it system or drive only vendors) will continue to keep prices hiked for the main stream markets for quite some time to come.....
 
neilz: I hope you have a good backup system in place if you're using 2nd hand hard drives...

You should anyway, hard drives don't automatically become more or less reliable just because they have been used before...

New hard drives can die at any time.
 
Multi petabyte for new year Mark?? Sounds like a rejustification to the board based on extenuating circumstances

It's got to happen so no turning back now :bannana:

My current working assumption is 28PB "usable" per site (minimum 2 sites) but I have a nasty feeling that number could double within 18 months.

I do however expect to have a long queue of very freindly storage vendors at my desk in January :rolleyes:
 
You should anyway, hard drives don't automatically become more or less reliable just because they have been used before...

New hard drives can die at any time.

Very true, but they have a finite life - after 3-5 years of use, the likelihood of a failure is drastically higher.
 
neilz: I hope you have a good backup system in place if you're using 2nd hand hard drives...

Do you have a backup car?

Old doesn't mean more prone to failure...

I've had the SMART status monitored (apparently) and they're at or above 98% health.
 
Very true, but they have a finite life - after 3-5 years of use, the likelihood of a failure is drastically higher.

I've had 3 HDDs from ~2007 all die (80GB ones) but am yet to have one from 1998 die.
 
Very true, but they have a finite life - after 3-5 years of use, the likelihood of a failure is drastically higher.

My experience doesn't concur with that.

I seem to find hard drives die randomly and no correlation between age of drive and failure rate.
 
My experience doesn't concur with that.

I seem to find hard drives die randomly and no correlation between age of drive and failure rate.

It's not so much age as use.

A HDD that has been sat near idle for 5 years may last another 5 years no problem. One that is a boot drive on a server that doesn't have enough RAM so is getting thrashed 24x7 may last less than 12 months.

As mechanical devices, they wear out

My oldest data centre was opened in 2000. There are servers that we put in on day one that have never seen a HDD failure. Likewise I have seen drives fail in the first few weeks.

But last year I spent some time with Google and they have so many drives and such control over tens of thousands of drives that they can tell you which drive is going to fail next to a level of accuracy that is incredible.

Often this is down to information based on batch etc.
 

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