Hard drive prices are starting to return to normal levels in the local market, after last year's Thailand floods affected about half of the world's production facilities, leading to a shortage of supply globally.
Jaya Jadhu, AxizWorkgroup component category lead, says supplies and prices have improved vastly since January, and the cost of a hard disc has come down by as much as 30% since its peak price.
Towards the end of January this year, resellers were reporting that hard drive prices were about 70% higher than they had been before last year's monsoon floods in Thailand, which accounts for about half of the global supply of the storage devices.
Several factories had to close up shop for weeks, as facilities were under water after flooding during last year's monsoon season, which was the worst in about 50 years.
Western Digital, one of the world's largest hard drive manufacturers, said earlier this year that it would only reach full production in the third quarter of the year, three months later than when the market expected supply to normalise.
Limited benefit
David Kan, CEO of Mustek, says from last week there was some price relief in larger capacity 3.5-inch drives from a terabyte upwards. He says 1TB drives have come down by about $5 (R38), while 2TB and larger have come down by about $10 (R76) a unit.
Kan says the smaller sized drives, 2.5-inch, have seen lower prices from entry-level storage sizes. “It's a good start.”
However, Kan says there is still a supply and demand gap, which means there are not likely to be large price drops for some time until production ramps up again. He expects the next price cut to come around mid-year, which should see costs dropping more during this month.
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