In 2011, massive flooding in Thailand caused hard drive manufacturers like WD, Toshiba and Samsung to halt production in the nation, causing a shortage in hard drive supply and an almost 50 percent jump in prices as demand continued its exponential growth.
According to cloud data backup provider Blackblaze, prices have finally stabilized back to pre-crisis levels, although still higher ... [ read the full article ]
Please read the original article before posting your comments.
To be fair to the HDD manufacturers, the values of currencies have dropped a lot since the flood as well. If you were paying for your new hard drive with gallons of gas, grams of gold, or (LoL) bitcoins, the price would be way down.
Part of the reason for prices not following the historic curve down is that we've reached the end of the huge recording density improvements since around 2004 from the introduction of perpendicular recording. There are serious physical limitations due to magnetic grain size and how small write heads can be made and still do perpendicular recording at greater densities.
For that reason, Seagate has introduced Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) which increases densities but has serious write penalties. WD has introduced helium-filled drives which allow it to stuff more platters into the drive. The future for HDDs will be one of serious tradeoffs in cost vs. performance.
