Lynn McGuire <
lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/22/2021 9:34 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
What has happened to the price of external hard drives ? The WD 8 TB is >>> $190 ! It was $130 or close to that last December.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN/dp/B01LQQHLGC/
The 12 TB is $310 ! It was $214 back in December 2020.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-External-Drive-WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN/dp/B07X3RBTQT/
I was going to purchase another 12 TB external and archive one of the
old 8 TB drives on July 1. Now I don¢t know. I may just get another 8 TB. >>>
This inflation thing and shortages thing sucks.
Less workers in the factory due to Covid19. Just look at what has
happened to the price of lumber (250%) adding $24K to the price of an
average single-family home since the pandemic hit. Mills were forced to
slow or cease production. Same for other factories. It's not a
shortage of materials. It's a shortage of manpower, and economics
maiming the manufacturers.
Yes but the SSD prices have dropped in half since the beginning of the
year. I just ordered a WD Black 1 TB M.2 for $120.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-SN750-NVMe-Internal-Gaming/dp/B07M64QXMN/
Lynn
Sorry, just us consumers here. Manufacturers aren't here to qualify
their costs. I still remember when tsunamis (c.2012) took out several
HDD plants, manufacturers had to relocate and colocate, and prices
soared, but if you didn't keep up with the news then you wouldn't know
why prices soared. I just use the devices. I don't investigate and
report on the intracacies industry.
If its better causes you want to know about, you could do the industry
research yourself. For SSDs, for example, see:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-prices-set-to-drop-in-q1-due-to-oversupply-of-3d-nand
With the pandemic, perhaps there were less consumers than expected
meaning there would be a glut in production in preparation for demand
that didn't happen. As the article notes, when production outstrips
demand (oversupply), prices drop. I'm not sure how any manufacture
could predict production rates on a virus that hasn't yet hit.
The article also mentions the seasonal demand on computers which affects
the demand on components, like HDDs and SSDs. Despite SSDs have been
around for several years, I still see articles about ramping up of SSD manufacture to meet demand. They have to produce before use, even for
JIT (Just In Time) manufacture, and tsunamis and pandemics have their
effects on supply and demand.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/285474/hdds-and-ssds-in-pcs-global-shipments-2012-2017/
Despite the components (NAND chips) costing more per byte, and barring a
sudden discovery how to manufacture them for far cheaper, eventually
there will be more demand for SSDs than for HDDs, but ramping up means
catching up. Despite SSDs are self-destructive storage, consumer demand
still rises, plants ramp up production which can compensate for higher
costs of components. I'm sure if you went to a business school they
would have more logistics on the industry and would bother to acquire
more information regarding the manufacture of drives. Just looking at
the end user prices doesn't tell you why they fluctuate. Considering
how the pandemic has severely impacted so many businesses, and even
killed off many or forced restructuring, I doubt Covid19 had no impact
on drive manufacture, nor do I suspect HDDs and SSDs have equal costs to manufacture.
You're also asking about different markets regarding prices. You notice fluctuations in the consumer market which is more tractable to less
durable storage to get more speed versus corporate customers where
endurance is more critical. When buying in bulk, like a thousand, or
more, HDDs or SSDs, what are those prices? You're the one citing stats
from Backblaze. They don't have any regarding high-volume purchase
prices for corporations, data centers, etc (instead of looking at retail
store prices for consumers which are also susceptible to whimsies of
marketing by the stores, or their excursion into a bulk purchase to
acquire special prices)? Besides all their failure analysis, I would
think they would also know about factors affecting prices to diagnose
trends since they buy lots of drives.
To me, and despite all the robotics involved, it seems more manpower is
needed to take the parts coming into a manufacturing plant to assemble
HDDs than to feed the robots the PCBs and chips to place the chips atop
the PCBs to run through a soldering machine. I wasn't intending to
address a special sale offer (a blip on the market radar). There are so
many factors in pricing that it would be futile as an uninterested
observer to fully diagnose in a short discussion here.
You cited one price on one product from one reseller. Got a graph
showing what their price on that same product has been over the past
several years, or whenever the product became available? A smart, or
risky, purchase agent can make a bulk request at the time right time to
get good deals, but pricing over time would show what they normally
would get. How do we know that your example isn't an outlier? And just
how long will that price survive? Looks like a special purchase that
won't last, so it becomes an outlier in pricing. Newegg has a similar
price, it is limited (2 per customer), will expire, and looks like
either a promotional or special purchase deal. Then the price goes back
to normal. Amazon's "normal" price ($250) is higher than Newegg's
($180), so why is Newegg cheaper than Amazon? You cite a single blip on
the radar.
Retailers have specials all the time, but often they won't tell you when
the special expires (which depends on when they exhaust their stock or
mfr supply for the discount they got), or what will be the price after
whenever their special expires. With their special discount along with
a further $50 discount if bought using their purchase scheme (Visa for
Amazon, QuadPay for Newegg), and a limit of just 2 items, this sure
looks like a leader sale, and not something you use to analysis pricing
trends. They can't afford to have a single customer buy out their
discounted stock as they want their leader to gain some coverage amongst
all their customers, especially since they know that if you buy their
leader product then you're likely to buy something else from them, too.
Bring 'em in with a tease. They may even lose money on a leader, but
it's a calculated and limited loss with the expectation of increasing
sales on everything else they offer. Many will even taunt you to get on
their mailing lists to tease you later with other discount offers, and
get you to buy more than just the tease. Sales knows how to manipulate
their audience.
So, back before Amazon and Newegg offered the discounted leader product,
what was the price before then, and what will be the price afterward, to accurately reflect market pricing? You say pricing has dropped about
half since the start of this year for this SSD product. Okay, the
leader is advertised as a savings of half. It won't last. It doesn't
affect the pricing trend for regional or global sales across all SSD
products. I'm sure if I kept watching that I'd find a seller going out
of business that would be willing to take a price even lower on their
remaining stock that they need to liquidate, but that also does not
reflect the pricing trend on a product. I can buy that product used at
eBay for less than half the new price, but that also does not reflect
the pricing trend for that product category.
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