RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Games and Tech random technology-related musings and ramblings...

hard drives. if you need one, buy it now.

as I mentioned in another thread, the western digital and seagate factories where both 3.5" and 2.5" HDDs are manufactured were almost totally wiped out in last year's tsunami. consequently, hitachi is the only major player left in the game - but their own manufacturing infrastructure is being stretched to the breaking point. there's a huge shortfall in HDDs right now, and prices are reflecting that trend. unfortunately, both western digital and seagate have projected it could take them until early next year to get back to their pre-tsunami production capacity, and with all the other products they're busy making it's unlikely hitachi will be able to meet the demand.

this is a perfect opportunity for solid-state drives. they're still ten to twelve times more expensive byte-for-byte than hard-disk drives and are still nowhere near matching their capacity (you can find one-terabyte SSDs but you'll be lucky to get in under four digits as opposed to a pre-tsunami one-terabyte HDD costing about sixty to seventy bucks). but with no moving parts, a fraction of the weight, far lower power consumption and no noise output, and many times the read/write speeds of HDDs, solid-state drives are definitely a more future-proof technology. if SSD manufacturers are willing to take a chance, drop prices by as little as ten percent, and negotiate better deals with desktop and laptop manufacturers like HP and dell, they stand to not only move lots of volume during the HDD shortage but get their foot in the door and gobble up a sizable chunk of the market share - and keep most of that once the shortage is over.

eventually the hard-disk manufacturers will get back up and running. but by then the market may have changed. what happens if the only people lining up to buy HDDs are PC-building nerds like me? what happens if apple or sony or some other high-end system manufacturer decides to switch to SSDs for their entire line of laptops (apple is already using solid-state drives in a sizable portion of macbook and macbook air models)? as with all commodity shortages, there'll be an initial boom in sales simply because people have been waiting for something to become available that hasn't been for a while, but about the time the factories really start churning out piles of HDDs, there just might be less demand for them than there was before the tsunami. prices might drop significantly below pre-tsunami levels... or it might signal the decline of hard-disk-drive technology altogether. that decline would probably be a long, slow one, but as we've seen with blu-ray and netbook/tablet computing in the last few years, sometimes all a new technology needs is to get a foot in the door in order to start taking over market share.

at any rate, those developments are months or even years off. for now, if you've been watching the prices of hard-disk drives and waiting for them to drop, don't. unless you can wait a year to a year and a half for prices to drop back to an affordable level, scoop up the hard drive you need now, because things are only gonna get worse before they get better.

Yeah! When I was building my new computer I got a Samsung Spinpoint 1TB HD for about $65, now it is up to $140! It looks like I got that and a Seagate External 500GB HD just in the nick of time.

samsung is still up and running but HDDs are an even lower production priority for them than for hitachi. between the two of them they might fill some of the void but it's only a stopgap measure and I doubt either will be willing to cut their prices much with the demand this high.

I have over a terabyte of porn, spread out over 3 hard drives.

Just wanted to share.

You should start your own porn internet

I did:

http://www.brazzers.com

http://www.videobox.com

http://www.videosz.com

compress that shit and back it up as a .rar archive. extract what you're gonna watch when you're ready to watch it and keep the rest zipped up. storage capacity will be at an absolute premium for the next year or so.

With a TB of porn, I doubt JLA's keeping anything zipped up.

Circle gets the square.

JLA can also just keep the entire directory compressed, if he's using Win7/vista and has the disk partitioned into an NTFS volume. That way, the files are compressed but readily available and can be watched without unzipping (the time needed to access them is negligible/nonexistent with today's hardware.)

The only trouble is that if he has the kind of media files (e.g. mp4, mkv, wmv, and normal ones that have very low quality) since don't really benefit that well from compression because they already have some sort of compression.

Also, I, too, have several TB of porn spread out across several volumes.

The compressed volume/directory thing also works wonders for games, iso files, and rom files (those things for emulation - and in the case of emulators that use ISO files, zipping them is not practical because the loading time will be ridiculous, whereas loading an iso will not make that much of a difference.) I've got 30+ PS2 images on my disc that would normally take a hundred gigs of space, but currently only consumes 60+ because of the compression.

that's what I was gonna say. compression works fantastically for documents and most images but not as well for audio or video since so many commonly-used file formats are already just about as efficiently compressed as possible.

JLA can also just keep the entire directory compressed, if he's using Win7/vista and has the disk partitioned into an NTFS volume. That way, the files are compressed but readily available and can be watched without unzipping (the time needed to access them is negligible/nonexistent with today's hardware.)

The only trouble is that if he has the kind of media files (e.g. mp4, mkv, wmv, and normal ones that have very low quality) since don't really benefit that well from compression because they already have some sort of compression.

Also, I, too, have several TB of porn spread out across several volumes.

Pro and I are trying to steal Sammitch's job.

I have also gone into teaching.

try to follow in my footsteps and you'll crumble under the weight of sheer despair and abandoned dreams. you can't shoulder it like I can.

I aim to shoulder it better.