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The flood waters are receding and manufacturers are bringing factories back online, but the major HDD distributors haven’t issued much new guidance as far as when they expect to be fully operational again. The big news this past week came from Intel, which lowered its guidance on Q4 results by a billion dollars as a result of the HDD shortage.
AMD’s lack of trouble (assuming Read was being honest) may have more to do with the preparedness of the company’s primary vendors than any obfuscation on Intel’s part. As for Nomura’s claims, Intel’s ultrabook push is still in its infancy, the company has set an aggressive target for next year’s sales, but has made no claims about 2011. ARM chips aren’t replacing Intel chips in notebooks, and tablets aren’t eating into notebook sales.
So what is going on in the HDD market? Not much, though there’s a major short-term caveat to that statement. Here’s what prices look like.
The Samsung Spinpoint F3 (in red above) is currently $149 at Newegg, but the site is offering $40 off with the use of promotion code EMCJHJE29. That brings the 1TB down to $109, and while that’s still nearly twice the price such drives were going for this past fall, it’s much cheaper than any other option we’ve seen in months. This deal expires on December 21, so if you plan to use it you’d best do so quickly.
Aside from the Spinpoint deal, prices have generally held steady. The 2TB Caviar Black is back down to $249 after rising as high as $279 just before Thanksgiving. Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda has fallen to $129, while the other drives haven’t budged. The Hitachi Touro Desk Pro saw a modest price increase up to $129, but the external USB 3.0 2TB drive remains a much better deal than any of its internal counterparts.
We’ve supplemented our previous chart with a graph to show how current prices compare with historical levels. The VelociRaptor 600GB and Hitachi Touro Desk Pro are the only two drives whose prices aren’t running at least 50% higher than back in September. At present, analysts continue to predict that drive shipments will impact prices well into 2012 with levels only slowly returning to pre-flood points.
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