Seagate Breaks Areal Density Barrier, Unveils First HDD with 1 TB per Platter

[LAN_deRf_HA]

They don't have to verbally collude. It happens naturally in a two competitor system. Nvidia releases a bunch of pricey ass cards. To some degree they do this because they have to with their big cores. AMD comes out with very efficient cards that could absolutely demolish nvidia's profits in a price war, a war AMD could afford easily. Instead AMD slots their cards directly between nvidia's offerings to enjoy the higher profit margins. These two party markets often end up being far less competitive. Without samsung under cutting everyone prices are just going to go up naturally. Though it will be hard to perceive with these new density drives as they'd have cost more initially anyways.

 

[blibba]

You don't think that prices in the HDD market are already decided by what the least efficient manufacturer can afford?

 

[newtekie1]

Without samsung under cutting everyone prices are just going to go up naturally.

In reality though, Samsung drives were rarely the least expensive, it is usually a WD or Seagate drives offering the best $/GB, but that is why the others had to finally give up.

Now that it is just WD and Seagate, it is possible that they will start to release higher products and never drop the price. However, I don't see that happening. As was already mentioned, the only real reason to buy a hard drive right now over an SSD is the huge savings in $/GB, so if they don't keep that going, then they won't sell drives.

On top of that, nVidia and AMD(or rather ATi at the time) really did have a verbal agreement to raise the prices, and they got in trouble for it too.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

It's relative. Samsung was always the cheapest of what I'd consider "worth buying" drives. The F3 series was often in the price range of WD's storage drives like the green shit.

In regards to nvidia and ati I'm talking long after that, like 200/400/500 series where nvidia kept digging themselves into a hole with these big low yield cores.