2TB drives offer best value for money

We’re all data hungry. We need our hard drives and over the years, we’ve noticed that they've gotten cheaper and more easily available. It wasn't uncommon to find some who would buy several, large 2TB hard drives storing their games, movies and music on them. However, in the past year, things have changed a lot. The PC market as such hasn’t disappeared, but it sure has slowed down. Prices of traditional hard drives spiked right through the roof. They close to doubled and PC users all over the world started to feel the pinch. 

Seagate and WD were both affected during the floods and prices of drives shot up further. Demand continued to rise steadily and supply has reduced and the extra stock has depleted over the end of last year. Prices almost doubled towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year. The rise in prices was because of a number of reasons - some of them very clear and some others, which are now said to be false. Some even claim that hard drive manufacturers hiked up priced and even reported great results. 

Current pricing of hard drives

Let’s look at how the trends in hard drive pricing have changed over the past year or so. We’ve put together this list of the hard drives as they are today. We'll be talking of average price of drives, primarily the mainstream drives leaving aside performance or special-purpose drives. These prices are based on prices present on online stores selling hard drives. They are almost identical to the market prices. Keep in mind that they are based on the Mumbai market in India. These might be slightly different in different parts of the the country. 

Desktop hard drive price trends

3.5-inch drives - always in demand

Let’s take for example, the price of the 3.5-inch internal drives. People use them in their PCs and there’s always a need to buy one more, when one runs out. These are usually the cheapest and offer the best value for money. The cost of say a 1TB hard drive today is Rs. 5,200. 1TB drives were considered to be the sweet spot as far as value for money was concerned, they would sell for Rs. 2,800 back in the end of 2010. There’s still a good 90 percent odd difference in prices. It’s not so bad once you look at higher capacity ones, such as 2TB, 3.5-inch drives. A 2TB drive would sell for Rs. 4600 or so back in 2010, now the same sells for Rs. 6,600, which is still a lot - a little more than 40 percent more expensive. The answer is simple - if you’re looking to buy a hard drive for your PC, you should ideally look for a 2TB model.