What is the best 2TB drive for under £70??

[errata]

By the way some external drive prices have gone up a lot less.

Get your screwdriver out!

[Avenger1324]

Current prices are just getting silly. Trying to source a load of disks for work, and between getting the list of available prices and clicking through to the product the prices went up - admittedly unlucky timing on my part, but they were higher still this morning.

We've had a reseller quote today over £95 for a 250GB WD SATA desktop drive - barmy prices considering what that money would have bought you a month ago.

Unless you absolutely HAVE to buy a harddrive right now, don't bother. There are a few sites which have better prices, but probably more to do with being slow to update their site than intentional.

Plenty of pics on the net showing what happened to the Western Digital and Sony facilities - they aren't going to be back up and running any time soon.

[spoon_]

Absolutely nuts, 2TB of storage is up to £125 now...

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-s...cache-89ms-ncq

I have been buying these drivers for £50 few weeks back!!

[Zybros]

You can get whitebox generic hard drives for good prices from PCWorld & amazon uk

[pumpman]

anyone buying a hard drive from these retailers who bumped up the price of the stock they already had in hand , want their heads looking at and remember these retailers in future. I bought one from a small one man run shop and his prices were still as marked a few quid dearer than the pre price hike of the online etailers , he knew all about the pricing but said that was his price and he was making his usual margin. So in future I will continue to use the wee shop.

[Firdelore]

You shouldn't even be thinking about buying another HDD right now - what with the increased prices due to the Thailand floods. Wait until things are back to normal, so make do with what you have right now.

[Top_gun]

I'm hoping for the HDD prices to go down in the first quarter of 2012.

A few of the HDD component manufacturers have restarted production in Thailand.

[Top_gun]

Short update:

The CEO of Seagate now thinks that HDDs prices should return to normal at the end of 2012 as the supply line needs time to recover.

It seems 2012 is going to be a profitable year for Seagate considering their factories were not touched by the floods and their major competitor, Western Digital, deeply affected by flooding.

[bobfoc]

Most of the vendors out there would have had quantities of hard drives in their warehouses.

This tragic event in Thailand has offered many of them to rub their hands together with glee as they look upon that stock with increased £££££££ signs!

It's even affecting the 2nd hand market. I've seen people successfully selling 1+ year old Samsung 1TB F3s for £65 each... Forums are now having a Hard Drive Profiteering clause to stop this behaviour.

[Saracen]

....

It's even affecting the 2nd hand market. I've seen people successfully selling 1+ year old Samsung 1TB F3s for £65 each... Forums are now having a Hard Drive Profiteering clause to stop this behaviour.

That's a tricky one.

We've long had a rule about not selling stuff second-hand for more than you paid for it, but it didn't envisage that situation.

To my way of thinking. the single biggest determination of second-hand vale is the market price of a new drive. If you can buy a new one for £50, only a fool pays £65 for a used one. But if market price shoots up, as it has, then second-hand prices of just about anything will reflect that.

If we assume, as a yardstick, the use price is about 50% of the new price, and the new price double or triples .....

I would not pay £65 for a used 1TB for unless I absolutely had to have one, and needed it now. In that case, if it's a choice of £65 used or £120 (or whatever) new, then I have a choice being buying new and paying a lot more, or buying used and paying a lot less, which is the same choice I had before prices shot up.

Personally, I was about to buy a couple of drives, but I don't actually need them, and certainly not now. If get to the point where I must buy and prices are high, then I'll have to buy, but right now (and for some months) I'd rather wait.

Is £65 a fair price for a second-hand 1TB F3? It is if you need one and can't get it cheaper elsewhere.

Nor is it necessarily profiteering. Suppose I have a 1TB drive and need to upgrade to a 3TB drive, which I'm going to buy new. I'm going to be paying a lot more for the drive I'm buying, and am merely offsetting a little of that by charging market price for what I'm selling.

[jimborae]

That's a tricky one.

We've long had a rule about not selling stuff second-hand for more than you paid for it, but it didn't envisage that situation.

To my way of thinking. the single biggest determination of second-hand vale is the market price of a new drive. If you can buy a new one for £50, only a fool pays £65 for a used one. But if market price shoots up, as it has, then second-hand prices of just about anything will reflect that.

If we assume, as a yardstick, the use price is about 50% of the new price, and the new price double or triples .....

I would not pay £65 for a used 1TB for unless I absolutely had to have one, and needed it now. In that case, if it's a choice of £65 used or £120 (or whatever) new, then I have a choice being buying new and paying a lot more, or buying used and paying a lot less, which is the same choice I had before prices shot up.

Personally, I was about to buy a couple of drives, but I don't actually need them, and certainly not now. If get to the point where I must buy and prices are high, then I'll have to buy, but right now (and for some months) I'd rather wait.

Is £65 a fair price for a second-hand 1TB F3? It is if you need one and can't get it cheaper elsewhere.

Nor is it necessarily profiteering. Suppose I have a 1TB drive and need to upgrade to a 3TB drive, which I'm going to buy new. I'm going to be paying a lot more for the drive I'm buying, and am merely offsetting a little of that by charging market price for what I'm selling.

Good argument above but I would still feel very uncomfortable selling something on Hexus for more than I paid for it just because the market value has increased. Hexus trading forums I feel are more about not getting ripped off and being a safe place to sell you're unwanted stuff or buy from a community member and helping out your fellow Hexites.

If I want to get the market value and that is now higher than what I paid then I can bugger off to ebay or some other forum and take my chances. Personally I'd hate to see the "no more than paid for" rule be ammended or have exceptions. Still I am aware this is tricky one and probably very difficult to enforce.

Profiteering: Profiteering is a pejorative term for the act of making a profit by methods considered unethical. (Wikipedia)

To make excessive profits on goods in short supply (Online Dictionary)

[Rob_B]

If you bought a Rolls-Royce for £10 and wanted to sell it would you sell it for £9 or it's 'real' value of say £500k?

Personally I believe the rule to be in place to mainly stop people buying in bulk and specifically doing so to make profits off other users, someone selling a HDD today couldn't have known about the floods and would be silly to offer it for way lower than its worth (but might still price it lower than ebay etc due to being a forum member) so personally I don't have an issue with someone selling that 1TB drive for £65 when they only paid £50 for it if market price for a 2nd hand drive is £65 or above. Hell, price it at £100 if you want, no-one will buy it so whats the harm?

[Saracen]

Good argument above but I would still feel very uncomfortable selling something on Hexus for more than I paid for it just because the market value has increased. Hexus trading forums I feel are more about not getting ripped off and being a safe place to sell you're unwanted stuff or buy from a community member and helping out your fellow Hexites.

If I want to get the market value and that is now higher than what I paid then I can bugger off to ebay or some other forum and take my chances. Personally I'd hate to see the "no more than paid for" rule be ammended or have exceptions. Still I am aware this is tricky one and probably very difficult to enforce.

Profiteering: Profiteering is a pejorative term for the act of making a profit by methods considered unethical. (Wikipedia)

To make excessive profits on goods in short supply (Online Dictionary)

Agreed, it's tricky.

There's an element of trust buying from Hexen, though clearly, it varies. Some have been here ages, some not. Some I know personally, but others not. But that implies that either the price I'd pay for a second-hand drive on eBay would be lower than I'd pay here, if indeed I was prepared to but an HD on eBay under any circumstances. I'm not sure I would be.

I referred to our rules here about selling for more than you paid, and my comments shouldn't be taken as a HEXUS ruling. I haven't discussed it with the other mods. It's just pretty much where I'd start from in such a discussion.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that selling above purchase price is, in normal circumstances, either akin to trading, or a rip-off, and I don't want to see either in our classified. But selling something at, or even a bit belong a fair and reasonable market price isn't really either, even if market price has doubled in a month.

It's only two or there weeks since I nearly bought one particular drive at under £29. Today's price, from that same seller, is over £80.

Suppose I bought a 1oz piece of 24ct gold 5 years ago? If I were to (and able to) sell it on HEXUS today, should I be expected to sell it at less than purchase price, when market price has shot up? If so, it simply won't get sold. I could sell it here at 20% under market price and the buyer is still getting something they could turn straight round and resell themselves at a profit.

So go back to that drive I mentioned. I could have bought new, retail and delivered, at £29, so what was a used one worth? £15, £18, £20? If I could buy that used drive at £20 now on HEXUS, I could probably knock it straight back out again on eBay for a decent profit, and that would be profiteering from HEXUS, and taking advantage of the goodwill of the seller, if he still sold it at £18-ish, just because it's on HEXUS.

As I say, it's not a ruling on the subject and we haven't talked about it, but my view on selling an HD on HEXUS, even if more than was paid for it, would be that given the exceptional circumstances, if both buyer and seller are happy, I wouldn't want to exercise the "no selling above purchase price" rule, even if we could prove it.

It is, as we agree, tricky.

[UseItNow]

Saracen, just seen your posts here, you make a point but I also refer back to the Trading rules which leaves me in a predicament as per here:
http://forums.hexus.net/storage/2164...lack-hdds.html

Thanks.