With ASUS announcing that it will run out of hard disks at the end of the next month [via theregister.co.uk/], since new ones are not being produced in enough numbers to meet demand. In this scenario, prices are rising sharply.
An example of the price increase of hard disks is this WD 2TB disk on e-buyer at £211 pounds currently. (Anecdotally, this drive was previously available two weeks ago at just over £50, a 400% increase!). I brought a pair of these Samsung HD204UI disks last month from Scan for £46.99 a piece, these are now £125 each, a 266% increase.
Given that the increase in hard disk prices has been quite sudden, and dramatic (and may yet continue), perhaps as we see the cost differential between solid-state and hard-disk is reduced the value of the performance difference between the two systems is increased. This makes it easier to see the performance benefits as a substantial improvement, rather than a significant cost.
Perhaps this could be the point at which the threshold is reached for the transition from the old hard-disk media to the newer, more rapid SSD platform start to occur, especially for single-disk platforms such as laptops, and netbooks, and the ultrabook (where an SSD is a necessity to meet Intel’s ultrabook requirements).
For those that need to store more information, it will still be cheaper to buy large capacity hard disks, but for the medium-term, in think that the low cost per gigabyte seen recently will be a thing of the past.
There will still be requirements for large slabs of storage especially for those cloud hosted solutions. Perhaps we’ll see the large swathes of “spare” storage in Google’s gmail become more reduced until production capacity can be returned.
But Thailand isn’t the only place where hard disks are produced, so perhaps Samsung will take advantage of the situation that Seagate and Western Digital face.
