HardDrive Prices gone through the Roof

I'm getting a new Drive not an SSD but a Sata III 6gb type and they have doubled in price over the past few months I looked into a bit thinking it was a Christmas rip off but it seems its the Earthquake in Japan which is the cause and many places are limiting people to small orders on certain drives and makes apparently its going get worse anyone know anything about this? and when its likely to get back to normal my main drive is terribad and seriously needs upgrading

how about ssd's?

overclockers.co.uk or whatever the url was, their parts are cheap. Or you can always look up on ebuyer.

These should be getting cheaper as memory is very cheap at the minute. BTW you should be buying 8gbs of memory at the moment as the high quality stuff should be around 35 in proper money.

Prices are not related to the earthquakes in Japan but to flooding in Thailand where a lot of hard drives are manufactured.

Think it's gonna be at least 3-6 months until prices are back to what they where.

ahh ok ty for the info guys dont think I can wait that long but they really have gone up a 1TB Sata III is now is around £140 now when it was around £60-70 a few months ago on E-Buyer and usual haunts

Good thing I am on 5.5 TB right now with 0.5 TB free. Will last a few more month.

Really need a new one as mine is slightly screwed, but not going to buy til they come down Or ill invest in an SSD

According to Seagate the problems will continue well into 2012, and don't expect SSD's to become cheaper because the demand goes up and they won't be able to produce enough anyway.

SATA 2 (300mb/s) SSD's like X-25M from Intel are decent price/quantity nowadays though, and they need to get rid of them anyway.

If you have SATA 3 there's some nice price/quality SSD drives from Crucial (M4) and Samsung 830 series that are reliable compared to the Sandforce chip SSD's (Vertex's etc). Just make sure if you have SATA 3, you buy 128GB drives, they're faster than the 64GB versions and close to the 256GB versions performance wise. Simply because they won't fit smaller chips on them as that'd hurt their prices.

And so the age of deleting / burning stuff begins again. Start backing your stuff up then deleting it ladies and gents. That or fork out outrageous numbers for storage

There's some current workarounds though, there's USB sticks that are dirt cheap. But there's also External HDD's that are only slightly above the old Internal HDD prices, well until they go out of stock as well of-course.

Ive heard external hdd's are exactly the same as internal just with a case, saw somewhere on a forum where a guy dismounted an external and it was basically Samsung F3 with a cover.

well they are
most are just a HDD in a box with shock absorbers and a small motherboard to convert signals for USB and a tiny power supply

Usually just a plastic box that also heats up the Drive inside