I've noticed HDD prices seem to finally be falling back down again after the inflated prices sellers decided to slap on with the Far East flooding excuse.

I noticed Novatach are selling a Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB 64MB Cache HDD SATA 6Gb/s for £84. Whilst not down to the £50 I was paying for 2TB drives before in inflated prices, that is still a much more affordable price.

Anyone else noticed drives getting cheaper? And where did you see them?
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Didin't look for HDDs lately, as I really don't need any, but I noticed on that on the site I usually order (Germany), they also dropped to a more reasonable price again, although like you mentioned, not like it was before the disaster.

I'm still waiting for 4TB disks to come, or for 3TB disks to get cheaper, meaning under 100€.
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Hitachi, who are normally the first company to release larger HDDs, have already released their 4TB drives. A bit expensive at the moment though.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/c...b/0s03363.html

£263.99 for 4TB, whereas you could save around £100 buying 2x 2TB drives.

also noticed SSDs are starting to fall in price. You can now get a 120GB drive for under £100 which is large enough for a Win7 system drive if you install all programs into a second drive.
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I would mainly need bigger ones to swap with the ones inside the NAS, but later, as I mentioned, I still have some space left. And most of the movies I watch, I don't keep, so it not only fills up, but also gets emptied from time to time
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Aye Harrison. Hard drives more than trebled in price for the floods out in Aisa. They are slowly coming down, though in this day and age, if they retired mechanical drives altogether, SSD & such could be an awful lot cheaper.
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Maybe. Ram prices in general have continued to drop. You can now buy 8GB DDR3 system ram for less than £40 and memory cards have really fallen in recent months. SSD HDDs are however still a relatively new technology and a lot of development is still taking place, so I expect that is half of the reasons for them not falling right down in price, although I fully expect makers are artificially inflating prices. At the moment it really isn't worth it to buy a 64GB drive as Win 7 would quickly eat that, and anything larger is expensive compared in price to the storage sizes of traditional mechanical drives of a similar price. And at the moment the question over the reliability of SSDs compared to mech HDDs is still in question. Loads of people still wonder how long they will last with frequent rewrites. One thing is for certain though, they really do speed up Windows booting to amazing speeds and make a system a lot quieter.

It does however seem from recent comments around the internet that mechanical HDDs mught be becoming more unreliable. And we have also just lost Samsung as a HDD maker, as Seagate just completed their takeover. The deal is that Samsung are now supplying more of the solidstate memory for Seagate and Seagate are making the mechanical drives. For me Samsung drives were brilliant for reliability, and their F3 drives were some of the fastest mechanical drives released to date, and at a price lower than any other maker. Now Seagate have taken them over that is gone.

And because of this I instead recently picked up a new Seagate 2TB HDD with 64MB and 6GB/s SATA interface as the price was really good at Novatech. However I was then looking for some reviews to compare speeds against the older 3GB/s SATA drives to see if I should swap the new drive with one in my main PC as it supports the faster interface, or just stick the drive in my server where it was initially intended... but in doing so uncovered loads of people having issues with the exact drive model I had purchases. Apparently the drives have been losing their interface between the SATA connection and the drive data. The data is all still there, but it can't be accessed. Seems to have been a firmware issue and my drive has newer firmware, so fingers crossed it is OK. It did seem this was mainly affecting QNAP NAS owners though (so DC work of warning not to buy Seagate Baracudda Green drives in future for your QNAP). I seems the drives would suddenly go missing from the system, with the OS saying the drives has been removed/gone offline. Rebooting normally brought them back, but then a full array rebuild was needed to restore the setup to normal. Sounds very annoying. But also some people were reporting individual drives vanishing from PCs and not being accessible, as the interfaces has stopped working, even though the drive data and mechanisms were fine. So I probably won't be storing anything really important on it now I've read that though and it might go in my emulation PC rebuild I'm currently doing.

Questions is, what make of HDD to go for now? As there are not many left to choose from. I just read Hitachi have been purchased by WD too, so that is another of the main makers gone too. That really does leave just WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

It must be getting a hard market for the traditional HDD makers to keep ahead in now that SSD is quickly rising because their experience is more in mechanical storage, and the memory manufacturers are joining into the Solidstate revolution. Samsung seem to have been the company to react the best to this as they already manufacture the majority of memory chips anyway, so offloading their mecahnical HDD business to Seagate in exchange for the right to supply them with their memory chips for their SSDs was a very smart move on their part.

It can't be too many more years before SSDs reach useful storage sizes and mechanical drives really do start becoming old obsolete technology. I'm not sure however if I would ever trust a soldstate memory based device as much as a mechanical one. With a flash memory bases device if something goes wrong you are more likely to lose the lot, whereas with a mechanical drive you will most of the time just get some corrupted data from read/write errors in once area of a disk, so a lot of data is still recoverable. Same is true for most technologies though. Analogue technologies might have been of lessor overall quality in terms of audio, image, storage etc... but the data was a lot more recoverable. If a vinyl record is scratched, you can still play it, just with some hiss and clicks... if a tape snaps you can splice it back together, and only lose the bit that was damaged, so can still recover most of the audio or video on it... compare that to digital formats... if a CD is scratched it often can't be read at all so is useless, if a memory card becomes corrupt all data is lost... I don't think the direction of technology development is always for the better... especially when it comes to secure data.
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Absolutely Harrison.

Infact, we already have some very very nice Samsung memory sticks available. You can buy 2 x 4GB sticks of this stuff for under £40; It is a brand new Die size on 30nm Technology for DDR3 meaning Less volts & WOW Speeds. This ram will do 2400Mhz @ 1.5v though it's only actually rated @ 1600Mhz

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...=8&subcat=1517

As I paste the link above, the monkehs @ OCUK have just put their prices up yesterday.

Your right about it still being early days for solid state drives. Defragging can screw them up & the performance figures kind of suck until you hit 240GB sizes. Its all to do with how they access the media.

The SATA 2/3 thing is absolute rubbish. X58 running SATA 3 drives is no faster than SATA 2 drives. I really don't know why they bothered.
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At the moment I'm still fine with my space, I have 5 Samsung 2TB F3s in my PC, which seem really to work very well, PC also runs 24/7, and in my Qnap I have 6 of the 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000, which also seem to be fine. They were kind of recommended for operating in a NAS system.
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It is a shame that both Samsung and Hitachi are no more now though.
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In terms of Hard Drives< I'd have to agree with their absence. Samsung drives were slower than the rest & the Hitachi Deathstars....sheesh!
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