We now know that things are getting even more crazy when it comes to hard drive prices since our primary Seagate Distribution point in Canada, Synnex Canada, has dropped publishing prices in their portal:
The prices were there last week. But now they are not. Hover over the Call link and we see:
- Vendor prohibits pricing to be published on the internet.
And, to top it off the prices are moving upwards at a faster and faster rate as witnessed by the ~$100 per drive jump over this last weekend for 300GB 15K Seagate SAS drives.
We have also seen mention of certain Tier 1 vendors pulling any retail stock and indicating $1K or $2K per drive or more when one enquired about purchasing additional drives just weeks ago. Now Tier 1 vendors are stating outright that hard drives are not available outside of system sales period.
The situation really begs the question: What are Tier 1s going to do to cover drive failures? Are existing customers going to be left in a bind if they have any drive failures?
Trying to balance the demand for new system sales versus supporting existing systems is going to be a real tough balancing act especially since there is so much uncertainty around if and when the offline factories will come back online.
Top that off with the fact that the hard disk industry is a relatively mature one so factory capacity has been pretty static over these last number of years. There may not be enough excess capacity to meet the hard drive shortfall. Period.
The current situation may be the catalyst that brings about a huge shift away from spindle based storage to solid-state based storage.
Prices are now close enough to Intel’s 300GB 320 Series SSDs for 300GB 15K SAS drives and climbing closer for the 600GB 320 Series SSDs for 600GB 15K SAS (3.5” drives) that we are almost at the whole point being moot.
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.
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