<story><title>Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/western-digital-agrees-to-buy-sandisk-for-about-19-billion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anoother</author><text>Really?&lt;p&gt;Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30.&lt;p&gt;Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and it&amp;#x27;s taken a long time to reach that level...</text></item><item><author>hga</author><text>Hmmm, when did the price decreases stop?&lt;p&gt;I last bought some high capacity drives in 2011 &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; before the floods in Thailand zapped the industry, and I now note I can buy twice the capacity, 2TB -&amp;gt; 4TB, for $35 less.&lt;p&gt;There could be demand issues, as companies like Amazon, Google, Backblaze, etc. etc. buy them in mass quantities to offer redundant cloud storage.&lt;p&gt;At the other end, SSDs have got to be eating the lunch of small-moderate capacity SAS enterprise drives, and if not now, soon enough the basic sub 1 TB drives that workstations and laptops come with.  I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; conservative with these sorts of things so I avoided jumping on the SSD bandwagon, but a recent failure of one of my Seagate 15K system disks prompted me to buy one of Intel&amp;#x27;s lowest end, lowest capacity datacenter SSDs (DC S3510 80GB) and I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m going to be looking back....</text></item><item><author>sschueller</author><text>This sucks for consumers. Prices are already way to high for HDs and don&amp;#x27;t seem to come down anymore. It is as if there is some sort of price fixing going on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cptskippy</author><text>This is all anecdotal but...&lt;p&gt;I bought...&lt;p&gt;1TB WD Green EARS HDDs in 2010 for $70.
2TB WD Red HDDs in spring 2014 for $89.
1TB WD Black HDDs in fall 2014 for $90.&lt;p&gt;Just spot checked the same drives...&lt;p&gt;1TB WD Green EARS HDDs go for $57.
2TB WD Red HDDs go for $89.
1TB WD Black HDDs go for $71.&lt;p&gt;So prices are slowly falling but I don&amp;#x27;t think that we&amp;#x27;re going to see the rapid falls we were accustom to in the last decade due either to technological constrains or consumer demand, likely both.&lt;p&gt;From 2000-2005 we went from 20GB to 500GB drives, a 25x growth in 5 years but in 2010 we only had 2TB drives which is just a 4x growth.  It&amp;#x27;s 2015 the largest consumer HDDs you can get from WD, Seagate, and HGST are 6TB, 8TB, and 10GB respectively. That&amp;#x27;s 3-5x growth for the 5 year period.  Why has growth slowed?  Is it a technological constraint or a lack of investment?&lt;p&gt;In the early 2000s you could only play music and movies you possessed so there was a big demand for storage space for all your ripped CDs and DVDs.  In 2007 Netflix introduced online streaming and today we have thousands of choices for streaming video or music on demand which combined with cloud storage options negated our need for high capacity drives.  I think the fact that people are opting for 120GB SSDs over 4TB HDDs demonstrates that the consumer need for extremely large hard drives is in decline.&lt;p&gt;In the past the HDD makers were very competitive but if you look at WD, Seagate and HGST today you can see they&amp;#x27;re no longer competing on drive capacities.  HGST is the only one that even bothers to sell a consumer grade 10TB HDD.  Western Digital has been diversifying for years; first it was portable backup solutions, then NAS drives, NAS solutions, Surveillance and Data Center drives, and just today they announced they&amp;#x27;re buying Sandisk, a major SSD player.&lt;p&gt;I think the industry as a whole is moving away from HDDs and for that reason they nolonger need to compete so ferociously on price points.</text></comment>
<story><title>Western Digital agrees to buy SanDisk for about $19B</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/western-digital-agrees-to-buy-sandisk-for-about-19-billion</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anoother</author><text>Really?&lt;p&gt;Before the flood, I seem to remember you could get a 1TB Samsung F1 7200rpm drive for £30.&lt;p&gt;Now, an equivalent drive will set you back around £35, and it&amp;#x27;s taken a long time to reach that level...</text></item><item><author>hga</author><text>Hmmm, when did the price decreases stop?&lt;p&gt;I last bought some high capacity drives in 2011 &lt;i&gt;just&lt;/i&gt; before the floods in Thailand zapped the industry, and I now note I can buy twice the capacity, 2TB -&amp;gt; 4TB, for $35 less.&lt;p&gt;There could be demand issues, as companies like Amazon, Google, Backblaze, etc. etc. buy them in mass quantities to offer redundant cloud storage.&lt;p&gt;At the other end, SSDs have got to be eating the lunch of small-moderate capacity SAS enterprise drives, and if not now, soon enough the basic sub 1 TB drives that workstations and laptops come with.  I&amp;#x27;m &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; conservative with these sorts of things so I avoided jumping on the SSD bandwagon, but a recent failure of one of my Seagate 15K system disks prompted me to buy one of Intel&amp;#x27;s lowest end, lowest capacity datacenter SSDs (DC S3510 80GB) and I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;m going to be looking back....</text></item><item><author>sschueller</author><text>This sucks for consumers. Prices are already way to high for HDs and don&amp;#x27;t seem to come down anymore. It is as if there is some sort of price fixing going on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>Physical disks are not going down in price because their market volume is shrinking, their technology is just not evolving. On consumer machines, the 5400rpm drives are being replaced by other 5400 or by SSDs, not by 7200rpm. So the 5400 disks don&amp;#x27;t go down in price, whereas SSDs do (albeit slowly, due to technological constraints).</text></comment>