While the tech heads out there would have seen this coming the regular user probably didn’t so I thought this was worth mentioning.
It wasn’t long ago when you could buy a 2TB hard drive for around $100 which was pretty good. However, prices of all hard drives may soon rise due to widespread flooding in Thailand earlier this year if they haven’t done so already. For the time being you may be able to buy drives at reasonable prices but as that stock runs out the price will head north as the cost is past on from the manufacturers. This can also affect the price of new PCs which will need to be factored in when making any decisions about a new purchase.
Suddenly, those old hard drives you have sitting around may have become a little more valuable.
However, there may still be cheap alternatives to get you by in the meantime. If you don’t require an internal hard drive you might be able to pick up a cheaper external drive of the same capacity. Usually, internal drives were cheaper than their external counterparts but the tables have turned in some situations. However, if you do require an internal drive, you might decide to go with a more radical approach and purchase a regular external drive of the desired capacity, take out the hard drive from the enclosure and whack it in a computer.
You may not necessarily get the precise drive you are after with the features that you want but at least you get the capacity you require for the short to medium term.
Otherwise, you might need to trim back the amount of space you were anticipating on putting in a computer to save some cash. Now, I’m not going to say something like “nobody would every need more than a terabyte” as I’m sure ten years from now I’d be quoted out of context! That said, cutting your storage may be a viable solution.
An optimistic way to look at this may perhaps be that this could be a catalyst for people to consider solid state drives instead of traditional hard drives. People will need to weight up the higher cost and relative lower capacity of an SSD over a hard drive but this could potentially be the tipping point.
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