Quote Originally Posted by Groundbeef View Post
If its any help I bought a 1000 GB Samsung HD103UJ Spinpoint F 1 for £79.89 (before VAT) in 2008 and have just purchased a Western Digital WD20EARX 2TB Caviar Green for £77.50 (before VAT) I know they are probably different speeds but its double the size.

Although as stated by snootyjim Its a little scary that there are only really two company's vying for your HD cash.
If it's any help, I bought all my 2TB Samsung drives at £55 quid including VAT, and my 1TB F3s for £39. Anybody that bought a hard drive after the price hike is shooting himself, and everybody else in the foot, because you're proving that people are willing to pay more for the same, if not a worse product that was sold for FAR LESS about 9 months ago, and let's not forget the garbage reliability WD's and Seagate's drives have compared to the Samsungs (my Samsungs came with either a 2 or a 3 year warranty -- the crappy WD and Seagate drives come with a measley 1 year warranty and I've seen these drives first hand -- dropping like flies out of our server arrays with read errors and eventually not being accessible at all, despite us barely using the drives).

I think now that Samsung are out of the HDD business, we're completely screwed. Just two giant greedy a-hole companies left to price gouge as they please. If this carries on the way it has now for the past 7 or so months, I may well never buy another hard drive again. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to pay more for the same technology I got for LESS a year ago. The flood is a joke of an excuse since about 95% of their sold drives go to OEMs with fixed price contracts. Plenty of other companies are struggling to make a profit, even without any natural disaster affecting them (like Sony, who reported a record loss this year) -- does that mean they should double or even triple the price of all their products too? No, because nobody gives a crap. The dumb average Joes will pay the price hike, so hopefully by around September time they'll drop back down to mid-2011 prices.

Quote Originally Posted by Shooty* View Post
Like petrol
And utility bills.

And then people wonder why the companies say "Woo hoo! Record profits! BUt, you know, times are really, really hard. Honest."
Fortunately, hard drives are not anywhere close to being a necessity, like petrol or electricity. Supply WILL die down at current prices, whether they like it or not.