News Hard disk supply 35 per cent short in Q4

PC manufacturers are predicting a 35 per cent shortfall in the supply of hard disks.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/11/28/hard-disk-supply-35-per-cent-down-in-q4/1

 

'predict that supply will drop to 110-130 million units, compared with demand fir 180 '

Typo (fir 180)

And increased HDD make me sad

 

SSD Cheesecake!

 

I was astonished when I saw the price of an F3 last month!! I had not realised how central Thaliand was to HDD production - maybe the industry should consider moving some of their eggs into a different basket..?

 

I wanted another SSD, so rising prices of HDD's made it a no-brainer...

I was waiting for the next generation of HDD tech to increase capacity myself.

dunx

 

i would happily just use SSD but when you have ripped your entire cd collection into .flac files then its gunna get real expensive i was luck that i bought couple of 2Tb samsungs when they were around £60 each now they are around £150 i would not fancy buying a new storage device for a good while and as for new builds then yes a SSD for you O/S has never been a better prospect

 

Are you seriously (or perhaps the industry itself) trying to tell us the consumers that the majority of hard drive production is done in one country and because of one flood that we are expected to pay over the odds?

Retailers may think they can rip us off by hiking prices up now and making more profit on drives they have already bought for much less but I won't be one of the fools to do so.

As much as I am keen to build a new PC altogether there still isn't one architecture out there that has me sold and much the same thing happened a few years back, so I just waited until the opportune time and then made my purchase.

So much stuff these days is way over-priced...

 

Makes putting a budget (sub £500) build together that has plenty of hdd space (>750GB) really difficult as a good portion now goes on the hdd and windows before you look at other components

 

This is old news and has been discussed to death in the forums for a few weeks! It strikes me as odd that BT (and other news sites) would be publishing a new article that basically just repeats what has been getting said for over a month.

 

totally agree with debbs...

 

@Niftyrat - just experienced that exact issue myself; was putting together a PC for a colleague only to find the storage cost a significant part of the budget!!!

 

As a system builder the current drive prices is killing me. Fitting a SSD is all well and good but you need to back that up with at least a 1TB spinner for game installs etc.

As Niftyrat said, once you factor in a license and hard disk you've already spent £170. As for people saying that retailers are profiteering, thats not the case. The wholesale cost of drives has gone up so much I actually make no more on them now than a month or two ago in order to shift them!

 

Things are only likely to get worse before they get better as the HDD component suppliers are yet to get back into full swing too and without those HDD cant be built regardless of whether or not WD or Seagate fix their production sites.

 

I've got a few Surplus WD Black 500GB drives...eBay quick!

 

I almost impulse bought a 3TB hdd from aria on the black friday sale for £135 but thought nahh, the 3TB drives were still very high cost compared to 2 2TB drives which could be bought for £106 not long ago, I'll hold out until things return to healthier prices even if it is 2 or more years off.

edit: sorry for not sharing it with you lot .

 

I doubt it. I have quite a few hdd's and don't recall seeing one marked "Made in Thailand."
Individual components of the hdd, yes it's quite believable. I don't know the name of the components, but I think it's the tiny parts that read info from and write info to, the disk plates themselves and the wipers that clean the surfaces of the disks constantly.
These are extremely delicate items that are farmed out to countries that have both high technology and low wages. If they weren't, these hdd's would cost far more than they do right now, and even when the supply is high. If we had to pay for a hdd to be made entirely in a single country like Japan or Taiwan or some other 1st world nation, we simply could not afford them.
Instead of griping about the cost of ssd's we'd be griping about the cost of hdd's for mass storage.

 

I hear Greece has alot of people waiting to be collared and cultivated to repay their debts to western society.

 

@Azrael808

I have spent months persuading the in-laws that my old amd1600 with 20gb is the reason why their internet is slow and why they cant store any more pictures/movie. Finally persuaded them to stump up some cash only to find that hdd prices have become stupid, ah well they have managed for 7 years whats 6 more months.

 

I searched, I LOL'd

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Samsung-5...K_Computing_HardDrives_RL&hash=item230fb6df9e