I probably average spending around six hundred dollars a month on hard drives, before the price hike, so I've been watching this closely. what I found interest

I probably average spending around six hundred dollars a month on hard drives, before the price hike, so I've been watching this closely. what I found interesting was that prices shot up almost immediately if you buy on line or through a distribution channel, but at Fry's? it took over a week, and even now, prices are lower at Fry's than at newegg, if fry's has stock. That's the kicker; 'enterprise' stock at Fry's is hit or miss at the best of times. On the other hand, Fry's quickly started getting serious about the 'limit X' - normally, if you want ten hard drives marked "limit 2" you ask a sales person, and they print you out five quotes. You take it to the front and get your ten drives. Not anymore. Now they actually limit you to the limit. I was able to buy enough 2tb RE4 drives to hopefully carry me through the end of the year. The other thing I did right away was test my stash of used and questionable drives, and return the bad ones. That's another 10 or 15 drives right there, The testing took a period of days (and I returned bad drives as I found them) - the replacements are trickling back, and it looks like all of them, at this point, are in the mail. But if this behavior was common, e.g. people that had large stashes of broken drives laying about that they returned all at once when news of the shortage hit? I can only imagine that the stresses on their stock for warranty returns are making the problem worse. Oh, also note, I have some 3tb, 7200rpm 'consumer grade' drives (hatachi and seagate) new, sealed, that I bought for a storage project that is suddenly looking not as realistic. I'd be willing to trade them for 'enterprise' drives of smaller capacities; contact me if you have 500g 'raid edition' drives or similar and want to trade.