So the Taiwanese floods hit a number of hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing plants, so the price of HDD's has skyrocketed with their supply dropping and demand not shifting. Recently I could obtain a fast 1TB HDD from scan.co.uk for Ѓ30 or just over, now it's already up to Ѓ108 for a much slower and less desirable model. Meanwhile, SSD's were largely unaffected, and buying a SATA III 120GB Corsair Force Series (A sandforce controlled SSD) costs Ѓ125.

Sure, 120GB is considerably less than 1TB, but said 1TB HDD would be lucky to get 20MB/s read/write speed with a 14ms access, while the sandforce SSD would get .5GB/s read/write with a .1ms access.

I'm under the impression that this might be what the SSD market needs to get a majority of people buying them along with laptops now being much more supportive of SSD's, meaning their prices should drop dramatically as larger demand allows for larger investment and manufacturing.

So ditch any builds that use a HDD unless all you need is capacity, gamers and many other categories of computer consumers want speed, and SSD's have it at suddenly a much more attractive price.



That all said I would like to note that I have no ill wish and do not wish to joke about or belittle the Taiwanese floods, this is just a commentary on the computer memory market.