Now Barracuda bitten by Thai disk drought disaster The deadly floods that wrecked electronic component factories in Thailand are sending Barracuda disk drive prices rocketing. We're told a 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT priced £171.95 ($274) on 22 September from eBuyer now costs £289.99 ($462), £118.04 ($188) more. Ouch! That's a 68 per cent price rise. A Reg reader says the rate …
Look carefully (i.e past the likes of Ebuyer and Dabs) and there are still affordable drives out there. And there are lots of externals which could be "opened" if need be.
Oddly enough the usually overpriced Maplin were looking far cheaper than Ebuyer for 3.5 inch drives last week and their external prices were not bad either. IIRC they had a 2TB external for about 100 sovs which, if you can get it open, is about half the price of a bare drive! Max of 2 per customer mind.
I have enough drives for now having managed to source a couple of cheap Freecom external drives that look like they can be "persuaded" to open
Given the current harsh environment within the economy, not buying a companies goods might mean it is not around later.
Given the size of my corp, we buy every quarter to replace PC's and servers on a fixed schedule. As a result of this flood, we are looking at SSD's and hybrid drives as an alternative to platters to get us over the hump. Given that higher pricing on platter HD's those new technologies now make financial sense and are faster.
I bought a 2.5" 320GB 7200rpm Seagate towards the end of October for £34.99 ex VAT from Novatech, less than 2 weeks later it was over £90 and they still had over 50 in stock. That was 262% increase!
They don't seem to list it today but Amazon have the same one also for a bit over £90 ex VAT.
Cheap labor and lax regulations, the same reason 9 out of the 10 most cancer causing cities are all within a short bus ride from each other in China. In Thailand you had cheap assembly workers, a country with lax regs, and low taxes (and probably plenty of ways to weasel out of paying even those) so you had a "perfect storm" of HDDs companies racing to the bottom and ALL using the same small amount of critical suppliers ina single area!
Paris because even she would have been smart enough not to put all her eggs in one basket!
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