UNI Computers » Industry News

Hard Drive Prices

Lance — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:04:00 +0000

If you follow prices of computer parts at all, you’ve probably noticed the sharp increase in prices of hard drives recently. This is due to flooding in Thailand where several parts of hard drives for all of the major manufacturers are produced. This has caused a shortage of parts to make hard drives, causing the prices to sharply increase.

Some hard drives have seen a 100%+ increase in price in just 3 weeks. This is affecting everyone from Dell to Apple to us here at UNI. Margins on computer components and full computer systems are always slim as the price for parts is ever decreasing. With this sharp increase, however, pretty much all manufacturers have had no choice but to either increase the price of their computers, install smaller hard drives at the same price, or do both.

One hard drive technology that was unaffected, however, were Solid State Drives (SSDs). These drives forgo the traditional spindle/platter/head design that resembles a record player for straight memory chips. The result is a much much faster drive, but also a much higher cost per gigabyte. Since these drives have none of the parts that are manufactured by companies currently under water, their price has been relatively unaffected.

It will be interesting to see how fast the hard drive component manufacturers get back online with parts so that prices can go back to normal. If it doesn’t happen pretty quick, it may just pave the way for SSDs to start a price war or at least come more in line with traditional hard drive prices.

Windows 8 release date leaked!

Lance — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:00:18 +0000

It looks like the Windows 8 release date has been accidentally leaked from Microsoft Netherlands. It looks like October 2012 is the current release date. If this is the case, and not just a rumor, then we should be able to expect Windows 8 beta editions early in 2012.

After the success of Windows 7, it will be most interesting to see if Microsoft can keep up the pace!

Best of Lawrence!

Lance — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 11:38:07 +0000

The US Commerce Association just awarded us “Best of Lawrence 2010″ in “Personal Computers”! We are greatly honored and humbled to receive this award. I always see these “Best of Lawrence” at great establishments around town, and am very proud to be counted among them!

Malware infection chart by browser type

Lance — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:31:58 +0000

Here’s an interesting site I ran across today. It shows the browser infection rate of the most popular web browsers currently out. Check it out.

Ubuntu 10.10 is available!

Lance — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 15:03:07 +0000

For all of you linux users, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), is now available. Head over to Ubuntu’s site and pick it up! We are going to stick with ubuntu 10.04 LTS for now on our inhouse fileservers, but will be staying tuned to how 10.10 progresses.

Solar Charging for your iPhone

Lance — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:09:46 +0000

Are you like me? Are you constantly running out of juice on your cell phone? Did you forget to plug it in last night? If so, never fear, solar charging is here to save the day! Novothink has released an Apple-certified solar charging case for iPhones. They claim two hours of direct sunlight will give enough juice for 30 minutes of talk on a 3G network or about 60 minutes on a 2G network. It also comes with an app to manage your solar needs. The product is called Surge, and it is sure to be a hit! (Hopefully they’ll release it for Blackberries so that I can join in on the fun!)

Yes, you can put in the batteries ANY way you want!

Lance — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 20:30:25 +0000

I read yesterday that Microsoft, yes the infamous Microsoft has developed a new technology for batteries. It basically means that you can install batteries (like AAs or AAAs) into a device in any direction, and it will still work! I know that sometimes the little icons imprinted in the battery bays trips me up, and this would be great as you can just pop the batteries in and not worry about them being backwards or turning your device into a pile of scrap!

This innovation is called Instaload, and Microsoft is planning on licensing it to manufacturers instead of making it themselves. I gotta admit, this is pretty cool!