Price of hard drive is down

Increasing consumer demand for PCs and electronics plus strong competition from Flash memory products have helped boost consumer demand and push hard drive prices to lower levels this year.

Research firm iSuppli said the average price of notebook hard drive products in the third quarter of this year fell to $ 53 - down $ 33 from the average price of the same period last year. Meanwhile, the average selling price of hard disk drives for desktop PCs this year has not decreased much compared to the same period last year - down $ 1.75 to $ 51.

In the third quarter of this year, the global market consumed a total of 134 million hard drive products - an increase of 21% over the same period last year. iSuppli said last year's figure was only about 114 million.

Krishna Chander, senior analyst at iSuppli, said one of the reasons for the drop in hard drive prices this year is the fierce competition between six manufacturers, including Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Fujitsu, Toshiba and Samsung.

' When the competitive level reaches the inevitable selling price of products, it will go down. A producer who lowers the price of the product will follow manufacturers , "Chander said. ' Most hard drives for laptops are now 100GB and cost about $ 50. Meanwhile, the price of 320GB hard drive for desktop PC is only about 65 USD '.

The decline in hard drive prices only affects the price of a laptop or PC product using a large capacity hard drive. And the product line uses low-capacity hard drives with relatively stable selling prices. PC hard drives are getting closer to the 1-terabyte milestone.

Another cause for the price of hard drives goes down, Chander said, is the development of Flash storage devices. This type of memory is gradually taking over the market for replacing hard drives with hybrid drives. The price of this memory device currently stands at about 7-10 USD / 1GB, much higher than the selling price of magnetic hard drives. This has contributed to maintaining a high demand for traditional hard disk drives for at least a few years.

Hoang Dung