back to article ASUS: 'We run out of hard disks at the end of the month'

ASUS managed a slight increase in profit for the third quarter of this year, despite the global slowdown in PC sales. ASUS is still shipping notebooks, but has also been strong in netbooks and has launched its own fondleslab range, all siblings to its popular Eee PC netbook, led by the Eee Pad Transformer, but to eventually …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I doubt desktops will go away, at least I will always have use for mine.

  2. Rob
    Thumb Up

    Smart indeed...

    ... also because their transformer has a very neat keyboard accessory that then makes it an ultrabook unless of course their are other requirements that stop it falling into this category.

    1. cloudgazer

      It turns it into something that more closely resembles a netbook. Ultrabooks are higher performance and lower battery.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        So Dual core Tegra 2 @ 1GHz and 16hrs battery.. is not ultra then?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        What?

        So, 14 hours battery life with a quad core processor wouldn't cut it in terms of an ultrabook?

        1. Ammaross Danan
          Coat

          Ultra

          "Ultra" as in "ultra portable." They run a low-power x86 CPU, such as a severely underclocked mobile i7 chip to eek out as much battery life as possible, but the primary drive is portability and long battery life. The transformer comes close, but it is quite underwhelming in terms of processing power and likely gets lumped in with "netbook" at that point.

          1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

            The transformer is very netbookish but, as a hybrid device, it's a little hard to really categorise it as "just" a netbook. From the perspective of netbooks it looks like an ultrabook, but from the perspective of ultrabooks it looks like a netbook. And it's a tablet.

            Neither fish nor fowl.

            Must be why I love mine. :)

  3. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Is this when SSDs take over?

    With the end-user price of HDDs getting close to double what it was a couple of weeks ago, presumably a lot more people are viewing SSDs more favourably. Whether for cost reasons or simply 'cos HD lead-times are increasing (as will SSDs as demand ramps up).

    Hopefully the increased demand for SSDs will drop the price as more suppliers increase production - or accelerate their plans for expansion - which will make them even more attractive, and HDs less so.

    So when the HD makers do get round to drying out their factories, they could find that a lot of their lower-end devices have lost the market and that the only people wanting HDs in the future will be after the BIGGUNS: 1TB and up - even though it's a hard task to fill one of those puppies, unless you have an impressively sized "video" collection.

    Although people scoff at small HDs it could be that they find the sizes of SSDs are more than adequate for their lappies, fondlies and desktops and when they get used to the speed of SSDs they'll be unwilling to go back to "slow old" spinning storage.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      .. or they'll get external drives to add further storage when the price is better.

      1. JEDIDIAH
        Linux

        Highly sub-optimal solution

        > .. or they'll get external drives to add further storage when the price is better.

        That tends to be a less satisfying option. Although upgrading internal storage could certainly be made easier. It's not that hard with most laptops as it is though.

        It's strange that you have to be a geek in order to even be aware of "better usability" options.

    2. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

      Or if you can not buy them

      Currently utilising existing equipment for HD's until the prices go down, I'm certainly not paying double and thankfully have a small stash of supplies and will turn to nicking from equipment not in use if necessary.

    3. Ammaross Danan
      Coat

      Numbers

      Unfortunately for everyone in the tech biz, consumers (read: mass sheeple) do not buy a product because it's labeled as "fast" or "gamer edition," they lie to themselves they know what they're looking at and buy the item with the biggest numbers. 2.53GHz is better than 2.1GHz. 6GB of RAM over 4GB of RAM. Webcam vs no webcam. And the kicker: 1TB (1000 GB) over the 120GB SSD. This is why SSDs don't do well on the Best Buy shelf: uneducated masses thinking it's worse because it doesn't have a big number. They have no idea what "sequential write speed" means, let alone "IOPS."

      If you want something less grey-area to argue with, SSDs are still far more expensive per GB than HDDs. Even if a 1TB drive costs $120, that's still $0.12/GB as opposed to $1.25+/GB of SSDs. Horses for courses and all that.

    4. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Size doesn't matter so much anymore...

      There is a practical lower bound price on components. Certain manufacturers aren't interested in selling the cheaper gear. So once you get to a certain price point, things don't get cheaper anymore. You just end up with "better" components. That means that it becomes increasingly harder to find small hard drives or even reasons to buy them.

      Before this flood, there was very little price difference between the smallest spinny drive you could get and a much bigger one.

      SSDs are still puny. It's easy enough to overwhelm them with just music and family photos. You don't even need to get into various forms of video hoarding. The gap between SSD and spinny disk capacity is simply too wide.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    write durability

    Until ssd have the same write durability as mechanical drives, I'm staying away.

    1. JaimieV
      Go

      Better start buying then

      Read and learn -

      http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html

      1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

        I had one SSD drop dead on me in a week - catastrophic total failure. One minute it was working, next it wasn't and I couldn't get a single bit off it. The replacement - exactly the same make and model - performed flawlessly. Is this typical? Maybe. I can't completely rule out murphy's static finger but it seems that the consumer drives are still a bit of a crapshoot.

        Which reminds me, I really should run a backup.

  5. Gordon Fecyk
    Go

    This is why iSlab will not rule the world

    As long as Asustek is in the field building cheap netbooks and (now) tablets running generic operating systems, Apple will not rule and neither will Microsoft. Apple can't patent the generic PC.

  6. Stefan 2

    20% HD price increase? Silver lining?

    It hasn't taken at all long for prices to rocket and availability of certain drives (500GB 5400RPM) to drop almost to nil.

    The silver lining may be a push toward SSD's.... unless those factories are also under water?

  7. Medium Dave
    Thumb Up

    Finally...

    ...my stash of old-but-still-working-so-I-wont-throw-them-out drives will pay off .

    Now, what am I bid for this fully fuctional 8G Quantum Bigfoot?

  8. Annihilator
    Paris Hilton

    Carrying stock

    "the company has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November"

    Genuine question, how long do PC makers hold stock for in general? I would have thought they did a rolling stock of roughly a month regardless?

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's a good thing

    The fewer HDs Asus has the fewer defective products they can ship. A blessing in disguise.

  10. Steve Foster
    Facepalm

    Acer Stockpile?

    Hmmm, presumably, Acer's flooding (sic) of the channel with inventory suddenly doesn't look quite as dumb as it did a while ago (assuming the equipment spec is reasonable).

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HD shortage may be good

    The fewer bug ridden products Asus ships, the better so the HD shortage may be a blessing in disguise. SSDs are far from reliable storage devices at this point in the game. Maybe in another couple years they'll fix the problems that exist.

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