Higher Hard Drive Prices, Still The New Normal

About 7 months ago, back at the end of Q1 2012 we researched hard drive prices and compared them to pre-flood levels. We concluded that higher prices would be here to stay for the next few years for a couple of reasons:

• Nobody is investing in next-generation facilities with only 2 serious players in the spinning rust market, there is no need reduce manufacturing cost in the medium term with next generation factories or processes.

• A lot of the specialist tools and precision equipment used for testing and building hard drives are no-longer available. The firms that made them have long since gone bust as the market consolidated in the last 15 years. Lack of such equipment is a barrier to increasing production and (re)building plants.

• While Solid State Disks continue to march into mobile, desktop, and enterprise storage, the bulk of new added capacity will continue to be provided by spinning disks. In the enterprise data centre they form either a thin tier or are deployed tactically to take care of IOPS/latency hot-spots. Hard disks in the enterprise are not about to be wiped out by SSD storage.

The bad news is that the majority of drives are still more expensive now than pre-flood. Some are around 60-70% more expensive than pre-flood levels.

If your organisation or project is hamstrung by storage costs or performance, talk to us. We have helped companies in Finance, Life Science, Academic, and Software sectors accomplish and exceed their goals, on-time and on-budget, in spite of rising storage costs. Get in touch to find out how.