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Is this our last chance to buy PCs/laptops/parts?

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glugglug said:
HDD prices still haven't fully recovered from the Thailand floods.

Super Typhoon Usagi is heading towards Taiwan most likely hitting Saturday. The portion of PC parts that comes from Taiwan is simply staggering. Should we be expecting motherboard, laptop, RAM, flash, & GPU prices to be tripling next week?
Click to expand...

The only thing of importance in Taiwan regards to PC manufacturing is these days is fabs. Everything else is pretty much in mainland China. The last finished PC part I had that came from Taiwan was back in 2006, a Gigabyte P965 mobo.
 
Kaido said:
SSD reliability & recovery still stinks.

I install tons of them at work and they all have pretty high failure rates. The only stuff holding up so far is my Mushkins, but those haven't been in for more than a year yet. And most of the time, when they die, they die - unlike a hard drive where you usually get reduced performance & errors, but can still clone the drive to save the data, and sometimes even operate for months despite errors.
Click to expand...

I hope you don't use Intel drives... Oh well, I just run Windows off my SSD and all personal files are on my couple year old Western Digital. I really need to get a second drive to back shit up. My USB keys are annoying to load up...
 
Drats, and here I was hoping for lower prices on 4tb drives to upgrade my NAS from 3tb drives 🙁

It will be a long time until I can replace this with SSDs:
[jr@Macross] ~> zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
SDF1 6.80T 1.21T 6.73T /mnt/SDF1
SDF2 7.70T 312G 7.69T /mnt/SDF2
 
... and the most quoted post of the day goes to...

yeah I'm not replacing PC parts every year or two. I still have HDDs in here from nearly 10 years ago. No reason for me to replace perfectly good drives that still have XXgb of available space.
 
SSD's are to expensive and prone to failure. I'm still using a 5 year-old 320GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive that is more than enough for me. I also have a 1 Terabyte USB 2.0 Hard Drive for long-term storage.
 
exdeath said:
Who still uses mechanical hard drives anymore? Ugh.
Click to expand...
HERPA DERPA where do I put muh bazillions of data without being a millionaire if I don't use mechanical storing devices?


I hope all this quoting of exdeath is not serious.
 
rh71 said:
... and the most quoted post of the day goes to...

yeah I'm not replacing PC parts every year or two. I still have HDDs in here from nearly 10 years ago. No reason for me to replace perfectly good drives that still have XXgb of available space.
Click to expand...

Unless they are raptors or cheetahs (eg very fast top tier drives in their day that can hold their own to average drives today) there are plenty of reasons. A 10 year old "plain" HDD is likely much slower than a newer "plain" HDD even if it isn't SSD.

What are you running that using 30 MB/sec 100 ms drives is fast enough, DOS 6.22?

:biggrin:
 
i've bought 10TB of spinning hard drives in the last 4 months alone just for me

need to finish getting all the old drives cycled out and start selling them off
 
I'm up to 4 500GB 840 Pros and a handful of 256 and 128 SSDs in various places. All of it put together wouldn't be large enough for my media box though.

When 1TB SSD is $100, I'll probably be close to replacing all my mechanical drives entirely. Right now I have a bunch of 2 and 3TB drives for data storage/backups, and it's simply not feasible to replace it with SSDs without costing a fortune. I remember checking a year or so back and a 1TB SSD of good quality was something like $2k.

Like everything else, it will get cheaper. But spinners will live for another 5-10 years easily.
 
Sonikku said:
Pretty sure they've recovered. They just like charging the higher prices at this point.
Click to expand...

Not to mention the dollar is even weaker. A lot of stuff costs more than it did a couple years ago.

But hey, if the market supports the current price of the drives then so be it. Computer hardware goes in waves. At one point video cards were dirt cheap (brand new 4870 cost me just under $200 at release). Then hard drives. RAM was below dirt for a while, though that has come back up some again.

It always has and always will be that way with tech stuff.
 
DrPizza said:
It's frivolous speed *for that particular application*. Well, at least, with a mechanical hard drive, I've never had a song pause in the middle for a couple of seconds while it buffers.
Click to expand...
...over a 100Mb network, with software RAID 5, on a Duron. 🙂 (it's just RAID 1, today, but that was still in place when moving to FLAC).

I intend to move to a ~500GB drive this year, and am just holding out for Black Friday time frame deals on models I'd like. It's easy to get envious of SSD-equipped machines, but I'm still going to be picky about it.

That said, HDD prices have recovered. The minimum prices are just higher than they were, and will take time to come down further, again. The pre-flood prices for tiny drives were the result of decades of cut-throat competition between vendors. The low end going from $60 to $45 is going to take a long time, if ever. The mid-range coming back to $80-120 has already happened, though, and HDD makers are getting back on track with density improvements.
 
Just a side note: the 2 120GB WD drives in my Dell are 5400RPM models. I also have, as spares, for if / when they are needed, 2 500GB WD drives (WD500AAKB), that are 7200RPM models (all are IDE interface)
 
bruceb said:
Just a side note: the 2 120GB WD drives in my Dell are 5400RPM models. I also have, as spares, for if / when they are needed, 2 500GB WD drives (WD500AAKB), that are 7200RPM models (all are IDE interface)
Click to expand...

I just retired an IDE boot drive. I had a drive go bad, and that was filling in. I wasn't completely comfortable using it due to bad sectors. There were more than I like, and they went through a run of increasing before stabilizing out. I just didn't trust it. Aside from that, it was too small.
 
So all PC parts come from Thailand?

Most likely the prices will rise, or the hardware companies would shift production elsewhere. So more hard drives, NICs, motherboards and shit from China and Taiwan.
 
glugglug said:
HDD prices still haven't fully recovered from the Thailand floods.

Super Typhoon Usagi is heading towards Taiwan most likely hitting Saturday. The portion of PC parts that comes from Taiwan is simply staggering. Should we be expecting motherboard, laptop, RAM, flash, & GPU prices to be tripling next week?
Click to expand...




When should we start to panic? I need to now so that I can add it to my Outlook calendar.

I usually need 15 minutes to work myself into a "panic" mode ...
 
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