MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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I know the floods in Taiwan have sky rocketed the price, and they seem not to be coming back down. Just as I really need to buy more storage too! A 1TB Samsung F3 7200rpm drive was £40 a few months ago ehen I bought one, now they're £115 (were up to £160 briefly!). Anybody got any ideas?
Have seen Hitachi 1TB external units in Tesco for £66, tempted to buy a couple and just junk the outer bits, as all I need is the drives themselves.
Buying some cheap external units and removing the HDs from them is probably a good idea, but they are likely to be a bit slower at data transfer than the drives that you'd normally put in a PC.
Might be a less good idea for a boot/single drive in a system, but fine if you need to increase your data storage.
The other, more expensive option is to get an SSD for your boot drive, and use a slower/larger, normal disk for storage of photos/music/films/etc.
I think it's a bit optimistic expecting that to be a short-term price increase, most estimates think it'll be into the middle of next year before production capacity is back to where it was. WD expect to only ship a third of the drives they were planning to for this quarter.
Trouble is, they'll be trying very hard to fulfil contracts with the big vendors (Dell, HP, etc) before supply to the smaller resellers, which then goes through to the usual online component suppliers you might buy from as an end user.
You may have missed the boat on external drives - there was a bit of a rush to buy anything at the old prices when all this started, and not much stock is coming through to replenish (that £66 drive is out of stock on tesco direct). If you can find one at a roughly sensible price though, worth going for. Normally they are just plain SATA drives in the enclosures so fine to use in a PC.
I'm glad I picked up some more drives a couple of months ago - a mate bought a new NAS and was about to order 4x 2TB disks to go in it before the prices tripled overnight.