News Hard disk supply could take two years to recover

Flood-ravaged hard disk component factories in Thailand say there's no quick fix.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/11/07/hard-disk-component-supply-could-take-years/1

 

I was planning on a storage upgrade since my current 1TB drive is decreasing in space and by year end it would be full.

As I am also thinking of a new build and update my HTPC with a NAS drive before I go to uni.

 

I timed my upgrade terribly, flood happened on the Thursday iirc and i got paid on the Monday..

However Amazon chose to sell 2TB Seagate drives for £78 last week so there are still some drives at more reasonably prices.

 

It's all well and good SSD's stepping up to try and start beating mechanical drives, but what are we going to do for cheap bulk-storage? I can't honestly say I want to pay £80+ for a 1TB drive.

 

Good news for the retailers.....
Most if not all of them have well and truly jumped on this bandwagon.
I believe the word for it is "Profiteering".
Should we put up with this? Should we name and shame these retailers?
EG: Before the floods this retailer had 50plus stock of the segate momentus xt 500gb at below £100
Now the same drive. And the same stock £269.99....They must have been to the same schoool of pricing as the petrol companies.
I say everyone stop buying mechanical hard drives and buy ssd's only. Then watch the prices move down.
People Power is a great voice.So lets not just be sheep!

 

A small group of nerds off an Internet forum will have no impact on pricing - the real cost is going to be paid by the manufacturers such as Dell, Asus, Apple, HP etc. They need huge numbers of drives and will be very prone to price rises - and they can't turn round and childishly yell "stick it to the man" either.

 

Your missing the point. We as consumers are not wholesalers nor are we "nerds". We are the people that keep these companies in business. We can make a difference. But only if you have a can do attitude.

 

No, you're missing the point. An average user on here, being highly computer literate and a self builder, will buy a handful of drives in a year. Take the entire membership and you have a few thousand drives.

Dell will use many times that in a day. As the end consumer we have basically no buying power over a product that is predominantly sold to OEMs. Simple economics.

EDIT: oh, and a retailer won't care if you just buy SSDs either, they're still making a profit. Bar some very early price jumps, the increased HD prices will be from the channel, not retailers deciding upon a 200% jump - their profit margins may well remain static.

 

I was planning a storage upgrade, but not anymore because of DOUBLES

 

Well I guess I've woken someone up? My point!
Stop buying them. And see what happens.You never know....

 

Couldn't be any true this... my notebook drive had to be replaced last week, a Samsung 470 128gb cost me 100eur, a 500gb 2.5 WD cost me 80€. The difference was so small, so I went to the SSD. Speed over Gb.

 

..Wow.

Hopefully the replacement manufacturing process will be on the second floor?

 

Sheer profiteering it is not, the retailers push the prices up to ensure they still meet revenue targets whilst selling less. They WANT to sell less so that their stock lasts throughout the crisis.

 

Yes a lot of the comments here do not seem to understand the laws of supply and demand. When a commodity is plentiful its price will be correspondingly low, the more rare it becomes then the price must increase as long as demand stays high. Additionally market forces such as competition have also been affected since all hard drive manufacture appears to be either entirely or partly located in this region.

 

I feel sorry for the people in thailand, but I would have thought that the HDD companies would have not put all their eggs in one basket. I'm in need of a new HDD, and, as always, I seem to need my new components at the worst possible time!

 

Uhm, nothing will happen. That is his point. 180 million hard drives made per quarter, probably 130 million of those sold to big computer manufacturers, maybe 30-40 million sold to local small computer manufacturers, maybe 10 million directly to customers worldwide. Now if you get 110 million of hard drives produced instead of 180 million, you got a shortage. What will happen if those 10 million refuse to buy the drives ? More drives for the remaining channels, but the price will not change.

PS: My numbers are of course wrong, i just pulled them from my hat (except the 110m and 180m numbers, those are from manufacturers and expected production drop), but you can bet that end user market percentage is in single digits compared to total production.

 

Not trying to defend said retailer here but you will find that a lot of the large web stores list the real time stock levels from there suppliers and not what they have in stock themselves.

As such as soon as there suplier puts the price up they need to raise theres as they havn't actually paid for those 50 plus drives yet.

 

I was gonna get myself 2 * 2TB, but i was only paid on the 31st, was then going to buy them on the weekend, but prices where already double...so this is going to be a fairly long wait....

 

I was going to get a 2tb hard disk a month ago and thought £55 I'll wait until they go below £50. That really very annoying as the same hard disk is now over £100.

 

Glad I picked up a spinpoint at the same time I ordered my new monitor a month or so ago!