# Hard Drive Prices Skyrocket



## jp1203 (Jul 21, 2005)

http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/ha...-drive-production-gets-worse#fbid=fVJGOr3J26-



> Interestingly, hard drive prices are now all over the map. At brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy, prices seem to have stayed the same, but at online stores like Newegg.com, prices have gone up significantly. A 500GB internal drive had been selling for under $80 but now is selling for more like $110. My guess is the higher prices will become more standard as the supply of drives shrinks.


Discovered this first hand today when I looked at hard drive prices for a laptop I'm working on that's developing bad sectors. Paid around half of what they cost now just a month ago.


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## leroys1000 (Aug 16, 2007)

It's sad but prices have shot up on everything.
I went grocery shopping and a roast that was
$6 a few months ago is $12 now.


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## jp1203 (Jul 21, 2005)

This is a direct result of the floods in Taiwan, though...there are some pictures on various news sites of the Western Digital building under water. Technology also doesn't tend to follow the trend of everything else. Price any laptop, printer, digital camera, etc. 10 years ago, then price its replacement now. More than likely the price has dropped significantly and the technology will run circles around what was available before.


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## dustyjay (Jan 24, 2003)

At some of the prices I have seen while browsing New Egg, I would be more willing to spend a couple hundred on a large SSD at the moment. Looks like build plans are goig to be on hold for a few months. Either that or I pull a couple drives out of my Back-up Image Drives for my next build.


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## Elvandil (Aug 1, 2003)

Actually, the major manufacturers have plants in Thailand. The floods there, especially outside of Bangkok, have closed many of them and left others with little access to the outside world. The major Chinese supplier of rare-Earth metals also decided to stop producing for a month in order to drive up world prices. The latter should improve as more sources are utilized outside China.


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## TechGuy (Feb 12, 1999)

We've been feeling it at our shop, too. We've been adjusting our pricing as quickly as we can to try to keep up.


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## jp1203 (Jul 21, 2005)

TechGuy said:


> We've been feeling it at our shop, too. We've been adjusting our pricing as quickly as we can to try to keep up.


Luckily, the people I do work for are tech-savvy enough to know what the retail prices of hard drives are, but not necessarily Newegg prices...so when I tell them "Hard drives got really expensive fast, and are almost double what they were a month ago" and give them a price, they don't think it's high. I suppose even if they did realize it was higher than it usually would be, they can check for themselves first-hand .


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