[ghshephard]

Not only are prices up, the Major Hard drive manufactures (Seagate, Western Digital) have cut back a lot of their warrantees to only one year. Evidence suggests that the spinning disk manufacturing companies are reluctant to invest in aggressively building supply/plants because of the transition to SSDs - the market demands for Hard Drives will be met - but nobody is expecting explosive growth will continue to grow.

SSDs are finally within about a factor of 3x where they need to be before their usage in Laptops hockey sticks, and a factor of 4x before they make major inroads into desktops. In about 18-24 months, we'll start to see a natural reduction in Hard Drive shipments as people just start buying fewer of them, and a _huge_ leap in SSDs and other flash based storage.

[velodrome]

Just a note, consumer-grade drives had their warranty cut.

HDD manufacturers have consolidated...What exists now is a duopoly. There was no reason for Seagate to cut warranties if their facilities were not affected by the natural disaster. They are never going to lift the warranty back to 3 years like before.

[philwelch]

They're already moving into the datacenter as well.

[beedogs]

They've been there for a few years already at the high end. EMC sold my former employer 2TB of SSD SAN back in '09.