Apparently, HardDrives.com has just been sold for $207,000 in a private transaction.
Congratulations to the seller, owner of Nam.es – that is a great domain “hack” by the way.
As for the buyer broker, Epik, they managed to break the price record for purchasing obsolete technology; for the past 12 months, solid state drives (SSD) are becoming the new standard.
The search volumes are tremendous and remain such. HDD remains the lowest cost mass storage device and will remain such for some time. It remains to be seen whether the terminology for mass storage device meaningfully changes. My guess is that it there is a good 10 years left in this cycle. In the meantime, HardDrives.com will sell all forms of mass storage products (not just HDD), lead-gen for data recovery, and utilities for managing your mass storage. I think this was a good outcome for all, but it requires immediate implementation. As you can see, the V1 site is already live. Also, Epik is not the buyer, we were the broker in this case — see my blog post on this topic: http://www.epik.com/blog/a-new-liquidity-model-for-domains.html
Thanks for the clarification on the brokering vs. buying part; in this case, congratulations for making a cut from the sale of obsolete hardware 😀 In my opinion, there is not 10 years of life left in “hard drives” or “hard discs”, in the same sense that nobody uses “floppy discs” anymore (the 3.5″ ones weren’t even floppy to begin with). But regardless, hopefully the buyer won’t regret their purchase.
I don’t see SSDs replacing hard drives ANYWHERE soon if at all.
a) Hard Drives are bigger and cheaper
b) Hard Drives is a synonym of “storage” for computer owners. Not everyone is a super geek. When you come to a store you say I want a big hard drive, because it took you 15 years to understand what hard drive is. And you don’t care about SSDs, Flash, External and whatever else.
c) Search amount for SSD, Solid State Drive is not even on horizon to even be consider as a comparable domain name or technology. Not to mention being more popular.
d) You know why floppy died? There was a limit of size that you could not grow. You could not grow floppy to 500mb with that old technology. No need to explain that hard drives did grow from 1mb to 1,000mb+ in this time spam and growing. More and more high amount storage solutions are announced.
e) Energy savings of hard drives, their noise, speed. Constantly getting improved. I don’t see this stop anywhere soon.
f) I don’t think SSDs or any other technologies will match HDDs price anytime soon. People still choose a cheaper solution in these days.
I could go on and on. Because I was seriously considering development myself. But sadly I do a lot of different projects on my own and can’t afford more funds to be spend on new start ups.
Good luck with setting up a business on HardDrives.com Rob and Tal, I am sure you will show people that even after 10 years this can be a huge commercial gem.
Algis, you’re the man for selling it for over $200k. The rest is fluff. SSD drives have fallen to 1/4 of their price a year ago. Meanwhile, capacity has doubled to at least 256Gb. That means SSD drives – which are NOT referred to as “hard drives” anymore, visit major retailers such as NewEgg for proof – have grown 8 times in the past 12 months. At the same time, the HD market has shrunk: fewer manufacturers, maxed capacity around the 1 Tb. With the introduction of fast 8-core CPUs, the plummeting of RAM prices and a new OS from Microsoft, the only bottleneck in performance is the drive. SSD drives are the immediate “future”. Hard drives are just about to become like the cathode ray monitors: obsolete.
How many of those who read this have SSD? How many have more then one HDD? Will you buy a 256mb SSD or 2gb HDD that will be only a tad slower?
This is a home user and corporate user market. Both don’t like to spend much. That’s why I don’t see people spending more money on less storage, just because it is smaller size and have some benefits they will never notice. 🙂