HD on one of the PCs has died and I need a replacement. I’d probably go with a [3.5″] SATA drive about 250gb+.
Had a look at scan.co.uk and dabs so far. Anybody found a good deal recently?

Ebuyer is normally where I look. But HDD prices have rocketed since the flooding in Thailand as a large number of the warehouses were damaged and stock levels are low – or so I heard.

Hard drive prices have rocketed recently due to the floods in Thailand. I’ll ask Mr Toast, I know he’s been looking at hard drives lately.

EDIT: Prezet beat me to it.

possibly the worst time to buy a hard disk. due to flooding in east asia production of hard disks are seriously down. what used to be £30ish for a 1tb drive and £50ish for a 2tb drive
you’re now looking at £120ish minimum for a £2tb drive.

look into getting a ssd for just the os. and a stanadard sata for the rest.

Apparently*, there’s bin extensive flooding in SE Asia which has affected production, so prices are very high atm… 😉

*A little bird told me…

There was a thread about this recently. Seems that the trick might be to but an external drive, then gut it for the drive inside the casing.

All very annoying as I need a new SATA drive myself. Might look in places like Tescos and that.

haha hahaha hahahahaha
Yep defo wrong time, WD have stopped making them for the moment and Scan is limiting to 1 HDD per customer !

The Velociraptor drives don’t seem to have increased in price though, still expensive it you don’t need one.

buy second hand if you can you can put a laptop drive in your pc if you want doesnt have to be a 3.5″ – I’d scout out on ebay or any geeky mates

Some background informationabout the problem.

If you need a drive in a hurry, and have the cash, then an SSD might be a good option.

^ that was a wry laugh BTW, I could do with a new hard drive 🙁

Awww booger 🙁
I did think the prices seemed to be pretty high! As it happend I’ve got a spare 7gb SSD that I can put the OS on and an old small IDE drive that will do for a bit of storage so will do that for now and then buy a bigger SATA when priecs drop again and move the OS onto that.

7gb SSD that I can put the OS on…

What OS is that? Win7 is a bitch to distribute over hard disks.

good old XP. Should be able to have the OS only on the SSd and everything else on the IDE – unless someone corrects me!

I was going to build my own PC until I saw the current disk prices…could buy the whole PC for £90 more than the hard disk so went for that….
http://www.ebuyer.com/251310-zoostorm-desktop-7873-1036

A further update – There’s going to be a shortage for the next year