@DrDave

You can get 8TB for $200, not big difference

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/comment/220817#Comment_220817

Yes, of course, as time passed and deal ended.

You can get 8TB for $200 from time to time, but every time I've seen it, it was already in an enclosure. For some reason, I often see HDD in enclosures being cheaper than retail packages that only have the HDD - why is that? Very strange, because it should be cheaper without the enclosure. That only shows you how much profit there is in HDD, that they sell them profitably including enclosure.

Meanwhile I've wanted to buy 4 of the 4TB drives for a RAID solution, and I wanted to buy them for $100 each, so $400 total. I have been looking for a long time, and I have NEVER seen a 4TB drive for $100 - but I have seen them for $100 or even less (like $90) when they are already in an enclosure. But I want just the HDD, so I can use them in RAID (and btw. not all HDD are suitable for RAID, because of stupid things like "green" power handling). It looks like there are not many HDD makers anymore, and so they have a kind of lock on the market, and for years now, the price is not going down for 4TB drives.

Anyway, it looks like give it a few more years, and all you are going to be left with is Seagate and WD - Seagate already bought HGST, soon Toshiba will get out of the business of HDD, and probably Samsung. And when that happens, with only Seagate and WD, you'll probably never see prices go down - maybe only go up. Bad for me, because I prefer to buy HGST or Toshiba HDD because I have very bad luck with Seagate - I had 5 different Seagate drives die on me over the years... also don't like WD drives because of their power handling and poor compatibility with Mac OS.

When I see a bad situation like that, high prices for gear that is not due to technical issues, but only due to market power, I am really glad to have the Chinese. Right now, the Chinese quality can be hit or miss, but their quality is getting better and soon will be equal (same thing happened with Japanese - from poor and cheap quality to top quality). So my hope is that the Chinese will get into the storage business and kick Seagate to the curb. The HDD market really needs some competition. Unfortunately, this will probably not happen for many years. We'll see!