Seagate: HDD prices cannot go down until end of 2012

20 percent my ass.. http://camelegg.com/product/N82E16822145493

Originally posted by hikaricor:

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20 percent my ass.. http://camelegg.com/product/N82E16822145493

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Great chart, and yes I thought the CEO was underselling, as well. Keep in mind he is talking about what he charges wholesale to retailers, not what they choose to sell at. I have noticed that prices are around 100-120 percent markup at NewEgg for all HDDs also.

The end of 2012? I guess that is the end of Seagate...their quality has dropped significantly and their prices were not competitive anyway...if they are going to keep prices high after WD drops the prices on better drives, they are dead.

Originally posted by KillerBug:

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The end of 2012? I guess that is the end of Seagate...their quality has dropped significantly and their prices were not competitive anyway...if they are going to keep prices high after WD drops the prices on better drives, they are dead.

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The flooding problem affects WD as well. I doubt they are going to be able to keep their prices any lower.

The net effect of this will be to speed the switchover to SSDs. With the price difference decreasing, they will look a lot more attractive, and the increased volumes will encourage the SSD industry to expand capacity and lower prices.

Fuck! no wonder i cant find a good WD drive in a black friday ad.

Originally posted by KillerBug:

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The end of 2012? I guess that is the end of Seagate...their quality has dropped significantly and their prices were not competitive anyway...if they are going to keep prices high after WD drops the prices on better drives, they are dead.

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That would be my belief, they are shooting themselves in the foot it sounds like!

I refuse to believe that Thailand is the ONLY manufacturing/distribution outlet for HDDs. I'm not insensitive to the folks there, but talk about putting your eggs in one basket. Corporations thinking with their 'money boner'? I don't think so.

This is just another excuse (similarly used by oil companies) to keep prices bloated, which also happens to be strategically during the holidays. They're firing up custom Cheech & Chong rolled Cohiba cigar & giggling like 4th graders that just through a cherry bomb down the boys room toilets as the principle went in to take a dump.

No, they're not making a killing on the market like the oil companies, but they stand to make a huge profit in an enterprise that isn't making huge leaps & bounds as it was 15 years ago.

20% where do they get these figures from, im seeing min of 100 percent to 150+ percent ever place I look...!

If the price increase really was only 20% it wouldn't be so bad... !! and I wouldn't be as pissed off as I am right now !! So who is getting greedy and taking the other 80 percent ?? ALL OF THEM THATS WHO !!

It does really make me think that along with all the business out their selling the stock the last of the stock they bought at normal prices and making massive profits post the flood that seagate them self's have decided to make a little extra to offset the unfortunate event and their losses as a result...?

Makes me wonder if another manufacture will invest heavily and pushes up production to cope with the demand. As doing so will leave them in a far far more profitable and favourable position when seagate recovers to a normal and sensible price.

As for seagate whilst they get the factory dry they should consider investing heavily in a production plant in other territories to ensure that this can never happen again as i can see this is really going to cost them dearly in the long run not doing so...!

Originally posted by LordRuss:

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I refuse to believe that Thailand is the ONLY manufacturing/distribution outlet for HDDs. I'm not insensitive to the folks there, but talk about putting your eggs in one basket. Corporations thinking with their 'money boner'? I don't think so.

This is just another excuse (similarly used by oil companies) to keep prices bloated, which also happens to be strategically during the holidays. They're firing up custom Cheech & Chong rolled Cohiba cigar & giggling like 4th graders that just through a cherry bomb down the boys room toilets as the principle went in to take a dump.

No, they're not making a killing on the market like the oil companies, but they stand to make a huge profit in an enterprise that isn't making huge leaps & bounds as it was 15 years ago.

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Well said!

Originally posted by SoulGLOW:

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Fuck! no wonder i cant find a good WD drive in a black friday ad.

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Man o man..........I was just thinking that same thing, "what about Black Friday sales on HDDs?" I want one

Oh man...

I just sold 2 of my 1Tb drives on ebay. Didn't get quite as much as I was hoping. Now I'm almost sorry I sold them :S I was thinking that this problem would probably be over within a few months. But they're projecting late 2012? Wow! Eh, I prefer larger drives now anyway. 2 and 3Tb drives are more practical for somebody like myself. I'd really like to see them bump the size up again. A 10Tb drive would be incredible :D

Originally posted by LordRuss:

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I refuse to believe that Thailand is the ONLY manufacturing/distribution outlet for HDDs. I'm not insensitive to the folks there, but talk about putting your eggs in one basket. Corporations thinking with their 'money boner'? I don't think so.

This is just another excuse (similarly used by oil companies) to keep prices bloated, which also happens to be strategically during the holidays. They're firing up custom Cheech & Chong rolled Cohiba cigar & giggling like 4th graders that just through a cherry bomb down the boys room toilets as the principle went in to take a dump.

No, they're not making a killing on the market like the oil companies, but they stand to make a huge profit in an enterprise that isn't making huge leaps & bounds as it was 15 years ago.

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Actually they do think with a boner and I believe that is true here.

Originally posted by omegaman7:

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(...) I'd really like to see them bump the size up again. A 10Tb drive would be incredible :D

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I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.

Originally posted by mscritsm:

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The net effect of this will be to speed the switchover to SSDs. With the price difference decreasing, they will look a lot more attractive, and the increased volumes will encourage the SSD industry to expand capacity and lower prices.

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Yeah, the price difference has decreased because HDs are now ridiculously expensive. Do you think that someone who could afford to spend £35-£50 for a 500GB-1TB drive is suddenly going to be able to find £400 for a 256GB SSD? And why would they, when they can still get a 1TB HD for about £100 (which still may be unaffordable to many people, myself included)?

LOL! I realize I have a bit of a wait for something like 10Tb. I can dream can't I? :p

We'll certainly see 4Tb before anything else. It'll likely be 1Tb platters X4. Platters will probably never see 1Pb. A petabyte drive will probably be based on Solid state technology. I would guesstimate at least 10 - 20 yrs on that feat! I'm patient! :D

Whoo not that i want to rub anyones nose in it.. more two fingers back up at the suppliers and their prices.. ive remembered ive got two customers with 4 x 1tb drives between them that came out of server upgrades... 4tb probably wont last me the year ... but it will put off me buying any expensive drives for my nas for a while :)

Just as a side note, how long is it going to be before people consider turning back to the days of drive compression to eak a little more space.. btrfs anyone .. ?

The problem with compressing hdd's or partitions is you will not gain much with compressed archives, compressed music, compressed movies and so on. And the down side is huge so I just don't see it happening like it did years ago.

My only question is how many millions the CEO is making on his bonus.

Originally posted by omegaman7:

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LOL! I realize I have a bit of a wait for something like 10Tb. I can dream can't I? :p

We'll certainly see 4Tb before anything else. It'll likely be 1Tb platters X4. Platters will probably never see 1Pb. A petabyte drive will probably be based on Solid state technology. I would guesstimate at least 10 - 20 yrs on that feat! I'm patient! :D

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20 years? In 20 years a petabyte will be necessary to download one 4k resolution movie for our 200-inch OLED TVs :p

@omegaman7, I think pretty much the same as you do. If nothing changes in a very short term, magnetic and optical technologies are clearly on their way to face extinction.

I don't think compression is a good idea because, as mr-movies said, you won't be gaining anything since the kind of data which actually wastes most of the storage space is compressed already.

IMHO, it will become a question of selecting more what you want to preserve. Let's face it, the free space on our devices will always be too little, it doesn't matter if we have one or 50 TB of storage. We'll adapt to the space we have, as we always have done.

I bought 2 500gig western digital hard drives for £60, same HDs are now £105 each! OUCH!!!

@Mr-Movies,

Yeah compressed files wont probably gain much more compression if any at all... but for uncompressed files eg office documents, databases etc it would be well worth it.

Yeah there is a cpu / speed trade off, but still depends on what your storing.

Reading up on the specs of btrfs and some upto date comparisons it doesn't actually look like such a bad option when compared against the drive compression systems of the past.

Originally posted by DVDBack23:

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20 years? In 20 years a petabyte will be necessary to download one 4k resolution movie for our 200-inch OLED TVs :p

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According to Moore's Law, which, please anybody feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, applies also to storage, we'd be getting twice the capacity for the same price every two years.

So, if now an average standard for capacity vs price is a 3 TB drive, in 2 years it should be a 6 TB one and, in 20 years, let's see... 3 x 2^10 = slightly over 3 PBytes. In fact, it should be normal to see 1 PB drives in any home in about 17 years time. Around the corner! :)))

But, of course, if we are thinking only of SSD technology (with mechanic drives being very likely obsolete by then) it might take a bit longer, because the GB price is still much higher at this moment.

And, of course, the capacity of any drive will be directly related to the intensity of the mental disorder of its owner if all of the stored data gets lost. X-D

Petabyte Drive could be sooner than we all think, in 2006 they said it was going to take around 4 - 5 years... Which we have passed..

Then last year : reported as 2 - 5 years

http://colossalstorage.net

This is what a 1pb drive (array) looks like today (well at the mo) link

Of course, it's a domestic, single, affordable 3,5" (or 2,5") drive we're talking about. That, in 2-5 years time? Wanna bet? Please, do! :)

Not such a good idea to have your production in the Far East then? Best build your factories in the UK!

Originally posted by marnie:

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Not such a good idea to have your production in the Far East then? Best build your factories in the UK!

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At 100 times the price lol Also, I'm quite sure being an island means the UK could be prone to flooding, as well :p

Originally posted by DVDBack23:

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Originally posted by marnie:

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Not such a good idea to have your production in the Far East then? Best build your factories in the UK!

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At 100 times the price lol Also, I'm quite sure being an island means the UK could be prone to flooding, as well :p

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I think the UK could make a 1TB drive for less than £6000. ;-)

I think this article from yesterday throws a little more light onto the matter link

@dali, if one thing time has taught me dont scoff at anything in the land of tech, i can remember the days when 1gb was an impossible number and then 1tb was so big it would blow you mind... 1pb will come (who knows when i was only quoting sources) and the fact a number of sources confirm that its suppose to be potentially viable and being worked on is a pretty good start.

And there is also this link

:)

@marnie, lol a plant in the uk could probably do it for £10, its just the £5990 tax that would make it £6000 lol

Originally posted by plazma247:

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@marnie, lol a plant in the uk could probably do it for £10, its just the £5990 tax that would make it £6000 lol

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Exactly right lol And overhead for a Western European factory would be astronomical compared to Thailand.

Originally posted by Mez:

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My only question is how many millions the CEO is making on his bonus.

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He only makes that bonus if people buy the companies product. That's true for any company. People just don't get it, you buy a companies product, your supporting how that company is run.

@plazma, my first HD was HUGE (and, therefore, extremely expensive) for its time, 80 MB in early 1991. 1 GB was science-fiction back then. I managed to buy an ultra-expensive 1 GB drive about 6 years later. That is, 6 years for achieving 12 times the capacity. Now, you're talking about multiplying the current standard capacity more than 300 times. How long do you think that's gonna take, seriously?

Of course we'll see cheap 1 PB drives and laugh at the times on which we thought 1 TB was so much... If we live enough! I'm quite sure that won't happen in 2 years, nor it will in 5. I insist: If you don't agree, please feel free to place a bet against me... ;)

Originally posted by marnie:

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Originally posted by DVDBack23:

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Originally posted by marnie:

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Not such a good idea to have your production in the Far East then? Best build your factories in the UK!

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At 100 times the price lol Also, I'm quite sure being an island means the UK could be prone to flooding, as well :p

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I think the UK could make a 1TB drive for less than £6000. ;-)

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Based on what I have seen of british cars, no hard disk made there would be able to spin without tearing itself apart...but based on the cliffs of dover, flooding does seem unlikely.

Mexico seems like a good place...it never floods in central Mexico, the labor is cheap, and the electricity is reasonably reliable.

@dali my first hard disk was the original Winchester ibm 10 meg ;) my first video card / display had a 1 colour mono output.

Now we have TB an increase over my original hard disk drive of 104857.6 times in size.. if it helps 1024 is the golden rule 300 times is a little short..

Regarding the display now i sit behind screens capable of well over a billion colours @ 32bit

Im not sure how long its going to take, but with nano tech coming forwards and leaps and bounds im really sure it wont take that long, its not like Pb drives (arrays) don't already exists. As for a single Pb drive... i don't bet its a fools game, but when you have more then one possible way to archive it, it looks optimistic to be sooner rather than later.

And forgetting a single drive for the second and maybe considering the array again, if I were to populated my home server with today's biggest drives to full capacity I would have 1/21th of Pb, so to have a Pd array at home I only actually need a 21x increase in size ;) either that or get a bigger case lol.

@ killer, lol you say that and then link some parts of the uk have a pretty good history of flooding lol.

Back on topic, has anyone looked at any of the catalogue shops whos prices are normally fixed for the season, in the uks cases argos, lol external hard disk went out of stock pretty quickly... now if you look on ebay many of them are being sold at inflated prices. There is one great seller telling people seagate expansion has a SATA3 Drive, where as far as im aware they only ever fitted SATA2 drives. They are suggesting people crack the external box open to get a cheap internal drive... although they also neglect to mention doing so will render the warranty completely useless as you can only rma the drive in the external box and not on its own lol.

@plazma, I just did the maths and found out that I have one 66th of a PB myself (something around 15 TB), lol.

Anyway, the technological boost that you are depicting happened after over 20 years. What about RAM? My first computer had 4 MB. 20 years later, my current desktop has 4 GB. That's a 1024 (2^10) times increase of the capacity after 20 years, exactly the same math I used to predict when a hypotetical PB single drive would come out... Which won't be soon, because it's physically impossible.

This article may be worth a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kryder

LOL! One cannot dictate innovation.

Dvd's are rather impressive when you think about it. Blu-Ray disc has surpassed that technology. VERY impressive. And now they can add more layers to that technology.
Have you ever heard of HVD? Holographic versatile disc? Over 1Tb on an optical media.
I suspect a technology, is right under our nose.
Not really suggesting that Optical storage is the future, because quite frankly I find it appalling. A tiny flake/speck of whatever, and the eye/laser is mucked up. But I still find it impressive.
We are still in our infancy. We have so much to learn... :p

Impossible is not a word I use very often. A human defying gravity like superman? Yah, that's probably impossible LOL!

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

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Actually they do think with a boner and I believe that is true here.

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Silly me... They did indeed (the BP, representing the oil companies) did absolutely nickel & dime the safety features so poorly in that last disaster that they thought they would get all the oil out of the ground & be gone before the line failed didn't they?

@ DALi

Im well aware of Kryders law, which is calculated from averages.




Extending this and basing off the average predicts 1Pb around 2025, however assuming there was another leap forward in drive technology before then and after a another period of small increases to pull the average back down, has this not always been the way. This means the average rule was still adhered to surely and one high figure was pull back down by the preceding and less exaggerated following numbers..? If so this therefore predicts its more then likely a Pb drive would likely be around the predicted date of 2025 how ever its also very like to fall in the next say the next 6 - 8 years based roughly on the idea you would have period of faster growth and then slower growth after the inception of the initial advance... but who knows..!

Although going back to your original prediction of 17 years (2029) time, Kryders law predicts based from the average 13 years (2025), but as ive illustrated its possible it could come before as there is likely to be a period of smaller growth afterwards... Having said that it could be we come very close say for example to say 600TB-800TB region and get stuck around that for a fair while before the Pb barrier is finally crossed and then it would fall closer to your prediction. But like i said im not a betting man.

@LordRuss

:) not that im defending BP far far from it, but in the case of the last big disaster i don't think haliburton staff going on a bender and pouring seawater into the bore helped lol.

Originally posted by omegaman7:

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LOL! One cannot dictate innovation.

Dvd's are rather impressive when you think about it. Blu-Ray disc has surpassed that technology. VERY impressive. And now they can add more layers to that technology.
Have you ever heard of HVD? Holographic versatile disc? Over 1Tb on an optical media.
I suspect a technology, is right under our nose.
Not really suggesting that Optical storage is the future, because quite frankly I find it appalling. A tiny flake/speck of whatever, and the eye/laser is mucked up. But I still find it impressive.
We are still in our infancy. We have so much to learn... :p

Impossible is not a word I use very often. A human defying gravity like superman? Yah, that's probably impossible LOL!

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A few years back I saw that MIT was recording something like 1PB on a crystal the size of a pencil eraser; and it was rewritable. The rig was pretty big, but even in prototype form it was smaller than a rack of disk drives totaling 1PB is now. Not all technology moves at the same pace; sometimes there is a new idea that revolutionizes a whole sector. It just might be that optical becomes the leader at some point.

Indeed, making accurate predictions is what's an actual impossibility. :)

And yes, technology evolves very fast... Though not that fast; everything has its limits. Being those estimated by past experience, we can assure, with pretty little risk of being wrong, that single magnetic hard drives will positively not achieve the PB boundaries in five years time, nor optical or SSD will. At least, not at a price we most humans may be able to afford.

Anyway, I am not a betting guy either. ;)

I think the recent conformation that indicates its possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light illustrates that what we know is may not always be correct.

link

What is the saying, nothing is impossible, just highly unlikely.

Originally posted by plazma247:

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I think the recent conformation that indicates its possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light illustrates that what we know is may not always be correct.

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I'm quite skeptical on this. Please keep in mind that those results are still pending of an independent confirmation, a test that the original Opera experiment didn't pass, which is the actual reason behind it being forced to be repeated in the first place.

Originally posted by plazma247:

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What is the saying, nothing is impossible, just highly unlikely.

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Amen to that, sir, totally agreed. :)

Posted the wrong link, the refined test also came up with the same results: link

Could care less about this. I've had two Seagate drives. First one was on the brink of failing after 4-5 years, and 2nd one is starting to show signs of wear after only 1 year. Never will buy from Seagate again.

Mike, the flooding affects more than Seagate. Western digital is also suffering greatly. This is bad news indeed, for the techie community...

All flooding aside, there is something funny in the HD market and has been for at least 6 months.

All of a sudden, newer, larger, faster drives are just not showing up!
I've been buying consumer drives for a long while and usually every year or so the size of the LARGEST drive goes up and the price of the previous largest drive goes down to $80.
For example: The 3TB drives are $130 and the 2TB drives are $80,
But they've been that price and size forever!!!
Where's the larger drives? Where's the cheaper price?

My guess? Demand is through the roof with all the video out there. The HD manufacturers figured out that they can't keep up with the pace and they might even be getting pressure from governments to keep the price up and the size down. (That's just my paranoid mind hard at work. I've not heard anything.)

People are amassing HUGE libraries of movies and songs and TV shows and countless other things, at the same time that governments are trying to crack down on that type of stuff.
Coincidence?

All I know is that I've been waiting forever for HD prices to drop again and now I cannot wait any more. I'll have to pay the outrageous prices. DAMN

@ThePastor

If that were the case my friend i don't think they would have been allowed manufactures make CDR's DVDR's BDR's etc..

For as long as their is a market for something people will try and fill it.

Regarding the wait.. its only been about two months since this started, they said from the start it was going to be some time around feb march next year before things recovered and then this blow... end of next year...

But i feel your pain... we all do, a conspiracy or not, were all over the proverbial barrel now..!

The entire computer industry is slowly grinding to a slow halt as a result.

If you wanted a conspiracy, what if they had come up with a way to massively increase drive size and making all older drives small and worthless by comparison... what better way to ensure all the old stock gets sold off first... although im pretty darn sure this isn't what is happening... lol i should have tried harder to fit something about 2012 in there but couldn't be bothered.

Originally posted by plazma247:

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I think the recent conformation that indicates its possible for something to travel faster than the speed of light illustrates that what we know is may not always be correct.

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It was already well established that it was possible for something to move at greater than the speed of light in relation to another thing. That is just common sense as two things moving near the speed of light can be going in opposite directions.

To break this rule, a particle would have to go faster than the speed of light through space while maintaining the normal speed through time in relation to the space in which it was traveling...and the experiment you mentioned did not do this, in fact they didn't even check for it.

If that neutrino did in fact go faster than light in relation to the earth, then that is important to science, but it has not broken the speed of light.

Hey man, i was just quoting the beeb :)

The point i was getting at was probably better illustrated with the we used to think the world was flat.. until ;)

Originally posted by KillerBug:

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It was already well established that it was possible for something to move at greater than the speed of light in relation to another thing. That is just common sense as two things moving near the speed of light can be going in opposite directions.

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You are wrong. It's special relativity we're discussing about here.

http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativity.html

"The Speed of Light is the same for all observers.
The first postulate -- the speed of light will be seen to be the same relative to any observer, independent of the motion of the observer -- is the crucial idea that led Einstein to formulate his theory. It means we can define a quantity c, the speed of light, which is a fundamental constant of nature."

According to this theory, NOTHING will ever move at higher speed than "c". That is, if an "observer" object "A" leaves some point in space at "c" speed, and an "observed" object "B" leaves the same spot at the same speed and in opposite direction, the speed of "B" in relation to "A" will be, as much, "c", and NEVER "2c", or, in fact, anything greater than "c".

Not easy to understand, can cause headache, whatever... But it's not my theory, it's Einstein's. And it had never been put in serious doubt for so many years... Until now.

Originally posted by dali:

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Originally posted by omegaman7:

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(...) I'd really like to see them bump the size up again. A 10Tb drive would be incredible :D

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I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.

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That will be great.. But I expect 50-100 TB in next year.
Because.. Blue Ray is taking a hell of space...