Seagate was given a bloody brusing at the hands of the dismal economy last year. In Q1 2009, the HDD (hard disk drive) market took a steep nosedive and plunged almost 35 per cent.

It sent the industry into shock, and Seagate was badly affected. Not surprising, since most of the hard disks in the world are made by a few players like Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samasung and Toshiba, of which the first two have the lion’s share.

“Imagine 40 million units wiped out in one quarter,” said Banseng (BS) Teh, sales/marketing VP and managing director of APAC, Seagate at their media update today. “It was the most disasterous quarter for disk drives ever.”

According to him, even during the previous tech recession in 2001 the 31-year old company never saw negative growth — at worst it was almost flat — but the market never shrunk, like it did last year, -1.4 per cent globally in 2009.

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There’s Xbox 360 going for S$399 with freebies like Webcam and charger, and $0 phones like Motorola Q offered by SingTel… but one of the fastest price drops and best deals is Western Digital’s Element portable drives.

The no-frills 2.5-inch external drives are going for $119 (previously $149) for a 250GB unit at various booths, and is one of the cheapest external drives you can get (Sim Lim sells a bare 2.5-inch drive for $111 cheapest).

Go down there and grab the bargains…

Looking for a cheap hard disk drive to store all your pix? Waiting to pounce on a good deal for that 42-inch plasma or portable laptop? This week’s the week to jostle with the crowd at PC Show at Suntec City.

If there’s something to go by, the last tech show here – IT Show in March – saw the best deal then for a 1TB hard disk. It was $199 for a WD external HDD. Sure enough, it was snapped up.

Look out for more bargains this week too.

Info here: http://www.thepcshow.com.sg/index.htm