back to article NetApp will jack up disk prices next month

NetApp is raising disk drive prices as a result of the Thai flooding. Here is NetApp's statement: NetApp empathizes with the people of Thailand as they work to recover from the tragic flooding. We work closely with our hard disk drive suppliers to stay abreast of their recovery efforts and to secure supply to meet our needs. …

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  1. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge
    Coat

    Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurv

    Love is in the air with higher HDD prices... NOT.

    Bring on cheaper SSD's... and pronto!

    Gonna leave IT for some other non-IT job soon...

  2. píru
    Trollface

    Surprise......

    No not really, people were quick to slate EMC for being the first to announce a price increase as a result of the Thai floods.... O look so are other vendors.

  3. heyrick Silver badge

    The part the would worry me

    is the slashing of warranties. If the product is not good enough to keep its warranty, it shouldn't be considered good enough to sell. Period.

  4. Chris Schmid

    Time to think about storage utilization

    If companies don't start thinking about storage utilization now, they will still buy the 15% more expensive disks because they have no other chance. SDD's won't be a real alternative as fast as companies would like them to be. And when storage companies incl. NetApp realize that HDD demand is rather inelastic to a 15% price increase, they won't start a raise to the bottom again and keep up prices as long as possible.

    With advanced data reduction technologies such as our Native Format Optimization, you can store 2-5 times more files on your existing disks and become more storage efficient. You need less HDDs and you are less exposed to these price increases.

    So why not starting to improve your storage utilization now, get really "green" and effectively reduce your data?

    Imagine you had an old car which consumes 20 litres per 100 km and you can get an add-on which lets you drive 200 km for 20 litres. Wouldn't you like to get this now instead of waiting for the electric car in 5 years (when electricity will probably cost as much as gas now) ?

    Thoughts?

    Chris Schmid, COO balesio AG

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      My thoughts?

      Nice advertising, however Netapp arrays have Dedup built in. Why would I buy your software when I can check a box and have the array do it? For free.

      1. Chris Schmid

        checked your dedupe ratios for unstructured files yet?

        Dedup is good for backup for less frequently accessed files. Dedupe on pre-compressed content such as a JPEG file results in 0% space gain. The process of decompression-deduping blocks-recompressing and writing again is just too cumbersome. So when you turn on your dedup on Netapp (or any other vendor), you see scarse results for frequently accessed unstructured files like Office, PDF, image data, etc. - but that is the stuff that grows more than anything else.

        Netapp is after profit, so I hope it is clear, they would not give it away for free if it saved you 50% or more on storage space. They give it to you "for free" because they know even when you turn it on, you still need more storage in the future, your data still grows. So in order for you not to look around for solutions that really help you with your data growth, they give you this "patch" for free.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HDD's and SSD's

    I know I am just one dummy out here and nobody really cares about dummies only bastards.

    I find it amazing so many hard drive manufcturer's were all in one place. Maybe that needs a second look all in itself, is there a possibility another market should pop up geographically away from the danger area?

    I say that sitting here on the West Coast, USA

    So my take is...

    Sure My WD's went up a bit, but not enough to cause a problem, and certainly I am not in the market until I actually need them, I am not "stocking up like a prepper." Already I see even the original spike starting to come down here in California.

    Also Frys has 120G SSD's for like $120 that's $1 a Gig. That Beats USB or Ties it Yes?!

    A pair would make a nice workstation + backup clone set - for $240 Boot Fast, access Fast, and use less watts. Don't forget the rails.

    I am already using (industrial grade) CF cards with IDE converters to save on continous watt drain, like the firewall, only uses 24 watts with the switch it's all under 50 watts I would assume with some fuzzy math + safety factor here.

    Such a lower power drain might also help others revive old hardware with low wattage psu's like all those dust packed 250-350Watt PSU's we all have stacked in the garage or attic who stopped working shortly after those new SLI/GPU nVidia card (with the equally new amperage demands) arrived.. heh before that a plain old vga card was good.

    Speaking of old projects..

    Too bad they don't make an MFM version of SSD. I would love to fire up a very old and loved box which I keep in the home made chryogenic chamber for long term no pests, no dust, no water, no magnetics storage. I have one mfm drive left and sadly it's only 10 MB not even a 40MB! it is a seagate though so technically we are good there. Did one of my friends back in the day steal my drive collection? damn.. I digress.

    Such drives might even keep some of the old low level stuff alive for the future, try accessing some old word doc or playing an old game that came on floppy. Chances are your current worksta has no floppy. Or like old bbs software it won't even run at all. But it DOES run on old hardware. And damn you can actually solder on those old ttl chips!

    For my modern stuff..

    I'll stick with purchasing "pairs of 500G or 1TB WD's" (and a pair of rails) when needed for now. I do have to say, though if I could cut back on some junk food, cigarrettes and beer (not likely) I might pick up that 120 G ssd "just to play" with.

    I predict the whole drive market will level back out eventually, I mean hell they had water damage, and things were destroyed, it does take time to re-build, and get back up, but then you get back up, and things go back to normal. Then again, 2012 doesn't feel like a normal year.

  6. Keith Smith 1

    WTF

    A 15% increase. Nice. I just got quoted US$15K for a dozen in a shelf 2tb ea. Nets like 8tb. So our margin on cgs goes up 2 points. We jack up prices 15. Nice

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