Aria slashes pricing on 3TB and 4TB drives

It was almost a year ago that the world's weather patterns combined to cause the tragedy of the Thailand floods. Alongside the loss of life, Western Digital's hard drive production was knocked for six and the world suffered huge increases in price. As KitGuru predicted, summer 2012 saw prices return to pre-tragedy levels, but now they are going further.
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KitGuru sees the cuts at Aria and gets the urge to back up vital files.

While some high street stores would have been significantly more expensive, the majority of the retailers that a KitGuru reader is likely to consider managed to keep their pricing for a 1TB drive below £120 as 2011 drew to a close.

Now that all seems like a dim and distant memory. While Seasonic and Hitachi enjoyed a sudden surge in the price of smaller drives, the underlying market pressure has been on the move to much bigger capacities. Plants that will produce large volumes of 3TB and 4TB drives, have been in the pipeline for a long time and, small price hike to one side, their time has come.

All things considered, hard drive capacities really come down to the packing density of the surface material and how many discs you can spin at 7,200rpm without a data-corrupting wobble setting in. The disks do not really change that much, neither does the idea of a read/write head flickering across the surface. Only the density with which data is packed on a platter – and how many platters are spinning – are really relevant.

Hitachi's Deskstar 7k4000 for example, uses 5 platters to offer you 4TB of storage. When it first arrived on our shelves around the end of March, some UK stores wanted close to £300 for this monster drive. Today, you can pick up this high-capacity drive for just over £203 from Aria.

If you're not sure about that 4th terabyte, you can opt for a 3TB Seagate Barracuda for just over £108.

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KitGuru says: The scary part is that the 4TB will carry on dropping for a while yet. Aria seems to have taken the price lead right now, but even if other stores have been slower to implement price cuts – that doesn't mean they are not coming. We're still expecting to see a 4TB around the £150 mark by the end of the year. Fancy a PC with 8GB of RAM and 8TB of HDD?

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