HDD Shipments to Drop by 35% in Q4 2011
Seagate has just lowered its shipment forecast for Q4 again.
The impact of the flood in Thailand is much more dramatic than previously estimated. Along with a 10 to 18 percent decrease to 41 to 45 million units, according to a report published by Digitimes, it appears that the HDD industry's shipments will decline by more than 35 percent in the current quarter.
According to Digitimes, WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba will ship only about 103 million units in Q4, down from 162 million in Q3. WD may be hit the hardest, with shipments estimated to be in the 22 to 26 million range, down from 58 million in Q3. Hitachi may drop from 32 million to 20 million and Toshiba from 22 million to 12 million.
According to Seagate, the global demand calls for about 180 million drives in Q4.
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Insane.... went online to check out prices the other day and it was $200 for a 2TB drive that was $60 3 months ago. I then went to check out EBay and they were the same price. So you have to love that junk. The people on ebay selling there drives for 3x what they paid for them. What a crock of S*IT!!
man this seriously put me out... i'm like screwed need another 2tb for my soon to be server...
free markets man. Why are you upset?
Yeah this is hurting enterprises that want to buy some SAN or NAS devices right now. It's like $5/gallon gasoline in the US. heh
buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.
The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.
Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare.
Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
Since the HDD prices are going up, sounds like it is a good time to invest in an SSD!
buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare. Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
Don't come to my house, I fill up drives rather fast. Video projects to other interests like backups ect. Got 8 drives in my game rig, 3x 2TB that I paid $80 a few months ago, 4x 1TB, and a little 30gb ssd that I use for paging.
Where do SSDs get made? Why haven't those been effected?
SSDs are made from Nand chips, so they are affect when flash RAM prices go up. They have no moving parts. There are 2 main types SLC (1st generation) Single Link Cell very expensive, and the newer MLC Multi linked Cell this is what most of the popular models use. Not as fast or reliable as SLC but a lot cheaper.
Where do SSDs get made? Why haven't those been effected?
None in Thailand.
Most are made in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan ,USA.
Maybe if you stopped downloading so much porn you wouldn't need all those terabytes.
buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare. Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
Don't draw conclusions representing EVERYONE'S situation based on your experience. It seems as though you are representing the average user in your assumption, not the smaller percentage of the market. So technically, not everyone can do with a 120GB HDD. About 20 to 30GB is for a Windows Install, about 200GB is for over a dozen games which I play frequently, and maybe 10GB or so for word documents, photos, videos, and so on. That's approx. 240GB. That's excluding backups of important files. The only junk present is about 1GB of deleted data in the Recycle Bin. HDD can fill up quickly depending on uses and needs. If you can live off of 120GB, then good for you, but not all of us can.
buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare. Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
120GB? I have that in just programs on my laptop. My home media server has 4TB and I'm adding another 4TB so I can keep putting my blu-ray collection on it.
This is the last big "cha-ching" for the old, tired, and slow hard disk drive. Starting next year, the rest of Apples best selling computers (the MacBook Pro and iMac) will probably use solid state drives exclusively. PC makers will follow Apple's lead in 2013...they always do. Imagine every computer in the world shipping without a hard disk drive. The once mighty hard disk drive relegated solely to the chore of secondary storage. That will bring the prices down...for good.
I was planning to buy Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB for $72, but then it jumped to $182-227 in a matter of weeks. I settled with 1.5 month used WD Caviar Blue 640GB for $100, better than waiting for Q4 2012 when prices are expected to drop.
Hmm... right now I have 427GB used. Granted, much of that is due to torrents (software mainly, some games), and lots of virtual machines, but otherwise it's still maybe 250GB or so, including the OS. I can't see myself using an SSD as the main drive, though an 128GB SSD for the os would be fine.
buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare. Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
i need tb of storage, and its not all from pirateing, much of it is games, and i dont uninstall the good ones ever because god knows the moment i do, i use up the space i got from uninstalling it, and get a craving to play it again.
point is, im running out of space and need a 2tb drive, but i need 2, one for backing up the first.
ssds are overpriced to the point that hdd, no matter how much they cost, will still look like the better solution.
I wanted to buy 4 or 5 Hard drives for a home server but now it is out of the question, why do I get the feeling they will milk this for as long as possible. Also forget about SSD's they are way to expensive for a lot of storage...I think they are milking the prices of SSD's too.
I think the smaller percentage of the market (in terms of dollars spent) are not users who only use 120 gb of space.
I always like to think of market size in terms of dollars spent, not the number of consumers in a particular market segment.
*the not was not suppose to be there...
Glad I got my 2 terabyte drive when it was $70. The real question is not when production in Thailand resumes but when prices goes back to normal. When crude oil dropped, prices at the pump didn't go down and even when it was about to go down crude oil went back up nullifying the intent to lower prices.
SSD's are looking like a solid buy for those who don't use that much storage.
looks like hdd makers(wd and seagate mostly) will milk/exploit this disaster situation for a while. this will make a !@#$ load of money for hdd manufacturers and retailers during upcoming holidays. prices are so high that ssds are starting to look like a good option!
i hope customers respond with enough dissatisfaction so that hdd manufacturers and retailers don't set prices so high.
Crap!....For a second there I read HDD price to drop by 35%....
current prices of hdds would be the best reason for the drop in shipment, not the crisis in Thailand.
Don't come to my house, I fill up drives rather fast. Video projects to other interests like backups ect. Got 8 drives in my game rig, 3x 2TB that I paid $80 a few months ago, 4x 1TB, and a little 30gb ssd that I use for paging.
Just add some 8GB RAM to the rig and thus avoid paging altogether. A lot cheaper and a lot faster than having a SSD exclusively for paging.
This is the last big "cha-ching" for the old, tired, and slow hard disk drive. Starting next year, the rest of Apples best selling computers (the MacBook Pro and iMac) will probably use solid state drives exclusively. PC makers will follow Apple's lead in 2013...they always do. Imagine every computer in the world shipping without a hard disk drive. The once mighty hard disk drive relegated solely to the chore of secondary storage. That will bring the prices down...for good.
Agreed.
For all those pissing and moaning about the high HDD prices, think of it this way- would you rather have the option to pay high prices for drives if you want/need them, or would you rather be told that there are no drives available for you to buy. Think about that for a minute and let it sink in. It seems that a basic understanding of simple economics has escaped the vast majority of our population.
If your Hummer with the extra 30 gallon tank is empty you fill it. Even when the gas is over $5.00 a gallon. You moan and groan but you still fill it. If I need a more space in my server I buy it. The convince of having all my music and movies on a server to me is worth it. Nothing is more enjoyable when my grand kids come over and are able to watch any cartoon, Star Trek, or the countless shows I have on my server. Money you can't take it with you.
I was in Bangkok and I can't understand the problem. The city is near the ocean and has many rivers going through it. So, the water should have just flowed down to the river then to the ocean since it's not a big plain like in Nebraska. There where many water sandbags & barriers, but I think that was just keeping the water IN.
Anyway, from what I can tell, people could have just poked holes in barriers to let the water drain out and this could have been handled better with less suffering.
Uhm, recently I went to buy a hard drive, and was surprised by rather high prices. According to price tracking site just recently they went up by 10-30%
Of course it would drop massively, who can afford the ridiculously high prices?