How to save plenty of Cash on HDDs these Days

Von Protonet Team. Veröffentlicht 7. November 2011.

As you probably already have heard the price of hard drives has increased significantly due to the horrible flooding in Thailand.

• Western Digital, the world leader in HDD production, was heavily affected by the natural disaster
• Seagate, an American company that outsourced its HDD production to factories in Thailand, lowered it shipments estimate
• Altogether it seems that every HDD manufacturer has (or is dependent on) production facilities in Thailand
• Some news sources say the flooding could impact global HDD production until spring 2012 while at the same time the global demand for HDDs is continuously growing

Now if you look at this graph that compares consumer prices of a Seagate 2TB HDD over the last 90 days, you’ll see an increase by more than 100%.

We at protonet are suffering big time from the price drama since we are preparing our first delivery of nodes to our customers.

But, lucky us, we managed to find a way to bypass the increasing of prices (temporarily): It turns out that the prices for external HDD are pretty much not affected yet.

We think this is because those vendors still have big stock reserves. Look at a price comparison of a LaCie 2TB Hard Disk (which contains exactly the above mentioned Seagate hardware):

We even spotted local shops that have plenty of supplies and offer it even cheaper than shown in the graph above.

Yes, you understood correctly: Right now if you need a Seagate 2TB HDD (or any other HDD) it is much cheaper to buy it with an external case than without.

Here’s a list of external cases and their respective HDDs (no guarantees + if you have infos on any other cases please write their spec in our comments we’ll update our list):

• „LACIE hard disk“ EAN 3660619318711: Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB (ST2000DL001)
• „TOSHIBA STOR.E ALU 2S“, Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB (ST2000DL003)
• „SEAGATE GoFlex Desk 2TB“, Seagate Baraccuda LP (ST2000DL003)