What's worse, the hoarders are out in full force buying up all the cheap drives from Best Buy, Future Shop, et al and trying to flip them on Kijiji/Ebay/etc.
Ebay prices for 2 TB WD drives show major gouging going on.
Big-box stores are one the only places where you can still find drives for reasonable prices, though there seems to be a little bit of a reprieve lately in some of the other vendor prices. Witness the prices for a
3 TB Hitachi at Newegg over the past month or so. A few weeks ago, Best Buy was selling the drive for $150 when Newegg wanted $289! It's also still possible to find non-crazy prices on drives at a few outlets, but I think their stock is being snapped up pretty quickly.
Major distributers (Dell, Acer, etc.) are supposedly okay for now, but I've heard that Dell is completely out of 250 GB drives and is now giving everyone free upgrades to 320 GB drives. A few weeks ago, Acer said they would run out of drives completely in December. Given the problems in restarting some of the plants, I've read predictions claiming that prices won't return to normal for a *year*.
Other price trends:
2 TB WD Green
Samsung 2 TB
I haven't even looked at SAS drive prices, but given how sky high they normally are, I'm almost afraid to look.
