Not only are prices up, the Major Hard drive manufactures (Seagate, Western Digital) have cut back a lot of their warrantees to only one year. Evidence suggests that the spinning disk manufacturing companies are reluctant to invest in aggressively building supply/plants because of the transition to SSDs - the market demands for Hard Drives will be met - but nobody is expecting explosive growth will continue to grow.<p>SSDs are finally within about a factor of 3x where they need to be before their usage in Laptops hockey sticks, and a factor of 4x before they make major inroads into desktops. In about 18-24 months, we'll start to see a natural reduction in Hard Drive shipments as people just start buying fewer of them, and a _huge_ leap in SSDs and other flash based storage.
And at the same time there's a story on HN[1] about SSDs being half their price. Enjoy the record profits while they last, the world is moving to SSDs and this will only speed up that migration.<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182944" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182944</a>