Fry's raises Hitachi-HGST 4Tb Drives again - Aug 7, 2012

ChristineBCW

I see that Fry's has re-upped their Hitachi 4Tb 7200 drives to $299.

Er, HGST.

This is up from two week-long episodes of $249 pricing, and after a brief stint at $269 as well.

I can't get used to "HGST" being Western Digital since Seagate drives have "ST" prefixes in drive-IDs.

Of course, my confusion will be easily solved once WD and Seagate merge. And who said MS had a monopoly?!!

So - what's up for next week? "Let's try $259..." or might we see "$239 with Limit of 2 per"?

Welcome, contestants, to Sales Pong...

yojimbo197

2020Pc has the Hitachi Touro external drive for 214 and shipping. You could always strip the drive from that.

yojimbo197

or there's the Seagate 4tB external for $203.

Kenshin

Microsoft was a US$1 billion company when it was first accused of being monopoly and being the ultimate evil... but Apple's 500 times larger than what Microsoft was then. Its very business philosophy is monopoly yet everyone likes the brand for being such a monopoly. It's not over yet with all the hundreds of millions of Chinese waiting for the arrival of iPhone and iPad in China.

Consumers need to become smarter than businesses.

There are, or were, two other important HDD manufacturers: Toshiba of Japan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea. Both were into NAND flash chip manufacturing, yet continued to make HDDs as well. Among the big five (IBM/Hitachi, Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Samsung Electronics), two were into NAND/SSD, one of the two gave up HDD business entirely - which was expected and planned, IBM sold its HDD business to Hitachi which in turn sold theirs to Western Digital... maybe Seagate and Western Digital will be able to continue maximizing their profits... where the others failed. The two companies together are going to sell something like 5 billion HDD units by 2020.

__________________
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tmc8080

I've read some bad things about the HGST 4tb drives.. something about a firmware issue causing the drives to click when data is accessed? Any non-usual sound like that can scare consumers away because many remember the "CLICK OF DEATH" that WD & Seagate had to deal with major RMA headaches again, caused by a firmware problem. And, nobody wants to be a guinea pig with 4tb of data... cheap price or not..

You'd probably be better off w/ 2- 3tb hard drives for about $135 each.

DM85

I'm still afraid too touch a 3TB drive. If I ever had the extra $$ I'd be more willing to play around with the larger units.

ChristineBCW

We haven't had any bad experiences with the 3Tb drives - well, one Seagate failed to do a Full Format right of the box. Fine. If the drive is going to fail, please please do it immediately!

But it's interesting to see Fry's is only selling the desktop 7200rpm 4Tb Hitachi (rotating its price from $249-269-299), and Egghead is only selling the HGST Enterprise for a steady $540.

All of these were delivered to market pre-Flood (ante diluvium, for all of the Popes among us), and there were WDs ready for market, too.

Where are they?

While we haven't had bad experiences with these GUI'd units, the lack of market-appearance by a broader vendor base gives a curious nod to the naysayer fears.

And I still need the 12Tb units.

tmc8080

12Tb's wont' be around for quite a while.. 2017? We may see 6 & 8 by 2014... so if you twirl the crystal ball that puts 12tb around 2017ish. Right on time for the next speed boost in throughput & interface standard, maybe multiple read/write heads too per platter? some of this was concepted in optical disc technology, much of it vapor R&D fluff.

I doubt 4tb drives were around in volume pre-flood... espeically in their first runs..
drives were at or over regular $300 then preflood. After the flood, enterprise 4tb drives? over $1k, lolz.