No storage is safe from price hikes -- Seagate raises hard drive prices, blaming inflation and market forces

Seagate has announced in a letter to its major customers that it will be raising prices, effectively immediately, across its suite of hard drive products. The move comes in response to competitor Western Digital sending a nearly identical letter to its customers a week before Seagate. Seagate is now joining the rest of the computer storage industry, where prices are rising across the board.

In a letter dated April 18th, Seagate outlines a return to previous demand highs, low manufacturing capacity, and a generally inflated state across the world market as being major factors in its decision to raise prices. The company further warns customers that additional price increases will come in upcoming quarters. The full letter can be seen at TrendForce.

Seagate's announcement to hike prices will come as no surprise to those who have been following recent developments across the hard drive space. Storage manufacturers have been complaining about reduced NAND Flash production for months, and have found everything from the Taiwan earthquake to AI to blame for disruptions in supply chains and rising prices. The largest players in the market, Western Digital and Samsung, control commanding leads in the HDD and SSD markets respectfully, and have an increased ability to set the price trends for their markets. Samsung alone holds 41% of the enterprise SSD market and has been leading the market towards price increases since the end of 2023.

As hard drives are becoming a crucial part of future AI workflows, the hard drive manufacturers of the world stand ready to receive a famously high-spending industry. That said it's unclear whether these industry-wide price increases are entirely based on corporations struggling with issues outside of their control. It wouldn't be surprising to see some extra profit-taking being baked in, after years of falling prices and demand caused many of these companies serious struggles. 

Regardless, if you're looking to upgrade your storage, the best time to do so increasingly becomes today. Technically, the best time was sometime last year, as we warned. But decent deals can still be found on SSDs and hard drives, which we've collected for you here. And if news of continual price increases has you wanting to shake something, you're not alone; check out this hard drive vibrating device that shakes HDDs apart in under a minute.