Hard drive prices begin the return voyage to ‘normality’

As any keen KitGuru reader will tell you, the price of the Samsung 1TB F3 drive has been our yardstick through these troubling, post-Thai-flood times.

Good news on drive prices has been trickling through, but it's likely to become a deluge soon enough. KitGuru installs a wide-angle lens and scans the UK's HDD pricing.

Given the nature of the natural disaster, it would be unfair to track Western Digital. With production calling like a stone, it would provide a completely unrealistic picture. Instead, we've gone with Samsung's bog standard 1TB drive – a popular choice with enthusiasts – following the SpinPoint's excellent ‘low noise reviews' from Valentine's Day 2008.

At the lowest point, Samsung's 1TB F3 drive was under £50, but then Western Digital's production capability was destroyed, Noah-style, and drive prices floated upward. Sharply.

By the start of November, the 1TB drive was higher than the F1 was at launch, in the mid-£90s – quickly reported on KitGuru.

For enterprise users, it got much worse, with 1TB drives sailing up to the £180 mark.

Today's good news is that it looks like the 1TB drive will finally drop below £90 in the next few days. Resellers like Scan are carrying the drive at £90.12, but the 13 pence price drop must come soon.

KitGuru says: Last year, we predicted that the 1TB drive price will return to pre-flood levels around the end of Q2 and we're sticking with that prediction. We managed to speak with OCZ recently about SSD sales and the inside track on solid state sales will be revealed shortly, here at KitGuru.

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