Sam,
"Could you tell us which distributors you look at?"
I am following Bason Computer, Access Micro, Bits and Bytes, and most recently CDW off a tip from Todd. Last week, Access Micro listed prices of over 200 drives although many of them were not in stock. This week they changed their format to carry about 50 drives they have in stock. However, the model numbers are different and the prices are higher for what appear to be similar drives. I could not use the data from Access Micro for last weeks report because they no longer list the prices of 28 drives I tracked.
I track drive prices for IBM, Seagate, Quantum, Maxtor, Western Digital, Fujitsu and Samsung for IDE and SCSI desktop drives. I also track Toshiba for laptop drives. I do not track all drives from these sources. I attempt to track a wide variety of capacities from each manufacturer. I tend to add higher capacity and faster drives because I expect them to have a longer life span.
My summary reports differ from real market pressures because I give equal weight to each drive. Realistically, some of the drives I follow may have very little volume and may not influence average market pricing. The pricing pressure in the sweet spot is what hurts the drive companies.
I agree it may be inventory clearing time that influenced last weeks price reductions. Also, I have noticed price reductions of old drives with the introduction of new drives that may be introduced for the Christmas season. We are expecting the latest wave of drives to have higher density, fewer components and therefore lower prices.
Mark M. |
