Falling hard drive prices.

[Pray To Jesus]

Heh. The supposed "build quality" is making me make a RAID 6. Don't want to lose all my data.

 

[Concillian]

I'm skeptical of that source as it states that "Average selling price is said to have been stable throughout Q1 of 2012 and is expected to drop only slightly in Q2 2012."

That's absolutely false: http://camelegg.com/product/N82E16822136769

Yes, I realize this is one model, but it's gone from $120 on December 30th 2011 to $65 as of today. I'd say that's a far cry from 'stable' and 'slight drop.'

The thing you need to realize about ASPs from HDD manufacturers...

90+% of the volume comes from OEMs like Dell and HP.
<10% of the volume comes from places like Fry's, Newegg, Amazon, MC, etc...

When the floods hit, they had locked in prices for the coming quarter with OEMs already... So channel prices had to rise incredibly high as a result.

The next quarter came along and they locked in higher prices for much longer than a quarter (low supply gave them the upper hand on negotiations, so they took advantage). This was probably a small price hike compared with the channel hikes you and I saw.

The channel can now come down to slightly higher than pre-flood prices and the MFRs can still maintain the same AVERAGE selling price, because the vast majority of their sales are to OEMs, and these prices dominate the ASPs.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Snip

I didn't realize that big integrators like Dell and Lenovo bought their inventory quarter by quarter. Makes perfect sense - thanks for the enlightenment!

 

[palladium]

WD's Blue line OEM drives have a two year warranty. Agreed, though, that the decrease in warranty length on many drives is a bummer for consumers.

This is why I stay away from the WD Green. Stupid 1 year warranty.....my Seagate failed thrice in 2.5 years. Should have got the Samsung F3 while it was cheap...sigh.

 

[jwilliams4200]

This is why I stay away from the WD Green. Stupid 1 year warranty.....my Seagate failed thrice in 2.5 years. Should have got the Samsung F3 while it was cheap...sigh.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say about WD Green HDDs there, but they have a 2 year warranty (AV-GP have 3 years).

I think Seagate is the only manufacturer that is selling some HDDs with 1 year warranties. That is insane. I cannot believe anyone would buy an HDD with a 1 year warranty. 2 years is bad enough, but 1 year? :'(

 

[Concillian]

I didn't realize that big integrators like Dell and Lenovo bought their inventory quarter by quarter. Makes perfect sense - thanks for the enlightenment!

They don't buy it quarter by quarter, but they make contracts for it.

They actually make their suppliers keep inventory in their warehouse. That is the supplier still owns it, but it's in a stockroom at the customer's site. When the customer builds a PC... THEN the customer pays for it. Pays whatever the contract price is.

What the drive companies did when the floods happened is move those contracts from one quarter in length to a year or two in length... if they wanted drives.

Oh, you want to build a PC... just sign here and we'll give you some drives.