Price comparison website Idealo analysed its historical price data related to both the HDD and SSD industries across its five European country portals. The results confirm market research predictions of hard drive prices remaining high, while indicating that SSD prices are continuing their rapid decline.
The average price of Idealo's most popular hard-drive-disks (HDDs) increased by 70 percent from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2011. While the prices of hard drives have decreased in each of the last three quarters, the average prices still remain 47 percent higher than the pre-Thai-flood prices from the third quarter of 2011.
Market analyst Fang Zahng from IHS iSuppli, speculated that HDD prices would remain high due to an increased pricing power among the top manufacturers. Idealo data shows that 93 percent of all hard drive products clicked on were manufactured by either Western Digital, Hitachi, Seagate or Samsung – all involved in the recent hard drive mega-mergers.
Average prices of Idealo's most popular solid-state-drives (SSDs) have decreased every quarter of the price analysis (six quarters). In 2012, SSD prices have decreased 24% with the average per-GB price 30 cents (€) less than in the 4th quarter of 2011. The most significant price decreases among SSDs has come from the larger capacity drives. The average per-GB price of SSDs with storage capacities between 160-256GB have nearly broken the €1/GB barrier.
In comparison with the HDD industry, Idealo click statistics show a much more competitive landscape among SSD manufacturers. The SSD products Idealo users clicked on came from twice the amount of manufacturers compared to HDD products (85 to 44). A much more equitable distribution of clicks among the top SSD manufacturers was also evident.
Despite hard drive prices remaining high coupled with the continual decline of SSD prices, the per-GB price of the largest capacity SSDs (300-600GB) are currently 9 times more expensive than 500GB notebook hard-disk-drives from the Idealo study. | 