Hard Drives Up to Pre-Flood Levels, Prices Stay Level

[Beck38]

Good article here:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/hard-drive-supplies-back-to-pre-flood-levels-but-prices-arent/

Seagate was never affected (no plants in Thailand), but their prices went up (somewhat) as well; gotta have those profits! Actually, I watch prices of large NAS boxes, and those with Seagate drives (non-'green', Barracuda 7200rpm SATA3, 64MB cache) are actually below that of a year ago across the capacities, 2-4TB drives. Others are nowhere near same, generally 25+% higher (and we're talking about boxes in the $2-8K level).

Maybe the others (and Seagate as well) will come down, but they might become used to the record profit levels.

[bijoy]

This is called profitting in business, nothing more.

[Skiz]

Just because they don't have plants in Thailand, doesn't mean that they don't receive parts from affected areas. I think if Seagate were able to offer lower prices than all o their competitors, and thus clean up in drive sales, they would do so.

[Chewie]

Businesses don't base their product prices on what generates a fair profit for them; they monitor the market and optimise them to make the most profit based on what the market will stand (what people are prepared to pay) and what they can supply.
Seagate will constantly map out graphs and analyse reports to work out what will maximiase profits while not leaving them with stock on their hands.
The most influential non-market driven price drop will be the age of their technology - when Seagate release new models (larger sized, faster performing, whatever) the older models will drop in price.
Computing hardware rarely actually gets cheaper to buy; you just get more bang for your buck. For instance, motherboards continually improve but the cheapest of the cheap always hover around the £30 mark.

[mjmacky]

Businesses don't base their product prices on what generates a fair profit for them; they monitor the market and optimise them to make the most profit based on what the market will stand (what people are prepared to pay) and what they can supply.
Seagate will constantly map out graphs and analyse reports to work out what will maximiase profits while not leaving them with stock on their hands.
The most influential non-market driven price drop will be the age of their technology - when Seagate release new models (larger sized, faster performing, whatever) the older models will drop in price.
Computing hardware rarely actually gets cheaper to buy; you just get more bang for your buck. For instance, motherboards continually improve but the cheapest of the cheap always hover around the £30 mark.

Actually, that's only one aspect of that. They also look at costs and find a way to lower them in order to generate more profit at a price they feel they can sell, hence all the plants overseas.

[mlindsay]

I work for one of the biggest electronic retailers in North America, and I stocked up when I heard that hard drive prices were going to skyrocket. Now I have 15 TBs of storage but the problem is....the prices never really went up that much. The actual COST of some of these did go up by 10-25 percent but it didn't effect the end price of the unit for customers much, just made our profit margins smaller and less of them going on sale, but the actual cost for consumers didn't get affected very much. Maybe online stores jacked up thier prices but in Canada here the price of a 3 tb hard drive went from $ 150 to maybe 160 and the price of a 1 tb from $ 90 to about $ 100. I feel like a fool for stocking up. :)

[Artemis]

I work for one of the biggest electronic retailers in North America, and I stocked up when I heard that hard drive prices were going to skyrocket. Now I have 15 TBs of storage but the problem is....the prices never really went up that much. The actual COST of some of these did go up by 10-25 percent but it didn't effect the end price of the unit for customers much, just made our profit margins smaller and less of them going on sale, but the actual cost for consumers didn't get affected very much. Maybe online stores jacked up thier prices but in Canada here the price of a 3 tb hard drive went from $ 150 to maybe 160 and the price of a 1 tb from $ 90 to about $ 100. I feel like a fool for stocking up. :)

There is no such thing as too much hard drive space. :yup:

[mlindsay]

Yes, I suppose your right :) Thanks for cheering me up, I don't see them going down too much in price any time soon.