Buying a new hard drive? Wait!

If you’re thinking of making a major upgrade to your home storage, I’d advise you to either buy now, or wait for a year. You’ll probably not get a really sweet deal anywhere in the middle.

Prices of hard disk drives (HDDs) are up by 10 per cent to over 100 per cent depending on where you are. The reasons for the increase in prices are many, the most notable being the recent flooding in Thailand last month. Almost all major hard drive manufacturers have their production lines set up there, and a lot of the factories are filled up with three to four feet of water. Not the best conditions for making your favourite Caviar or Barracuda, I say.

Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba have all cut forecasts for shipments by at least 35 per cent this quarter, with WD being hit the hardest. It appears that the global demand for HDDs is around 180 million drives, and that target will be missed by about 50 million units.

Even though analysts initially predicted a turbulent fourth quarter this year followed by recovery of hard drive inventories during the coming spring, Seagate Chief Executive Officer Stephen J. Luczo is far less optimistic. “This is going to take a lot longer than people are assuming, until the end of 2012 at least,” he says. “And by then, demand will have gone up,” he told Bloomberg last week.

With a weak Rupee implying higher import costs, we're not going to be a happy lot. Prices have gone from Rs 2,600 for a 1TB hard drive to over Rs 5000 today. I bought a 320GB Caviar Blue for Rs 1,900 somewhere around August, today a slightly inferior version of the same drive sits at around Rs 4000, if you can find it at all. That’s about a 50 per cent increase on most drives across the board.
Arguably, the hardest hit will be corporations, who buy these drives en masse.

On the brighter side, it may just be cheaper to buy a solid state drive if hard drives get any more expensive. Well, not really…

-Ojas Sarup