News Hard disk supply could take two years to recover

I'm sure that my computers value as at least doubled since this tragic accident


Hopefully I should be set for a while. If not to optical media I go (never thought I'd say that)

 

kinda glad my HAF 922's got lots of hard drive bays - I can resurrect all the old drives I have lying around and get them raided...

I have ignored raid for Samsung F3 1TB drives as it's just so much less complex...

 

I would just point out that some UK retailers have priced their hard drives very high in order to try to reduce demand. My employer has put prices up as well as imposed a 1 hard driver per order limit.

It's not because we want to fleece customers for money, it's because we need to keep enough hard drives to supply customers. Customers that include business clients, as well as our own pre-built machines. If that means some customers don't buy due to the price, then that is regrettable, as it is for the customers who actually NEED a hard drive (as opposed to just want), but can you imagine what would happen if we didn't?

Say we sold hard drives at old levels for a month. Other retailers prices are on the rise, so customers flood to us for the cheaper drives. We get a nice chunk of money from that sure, but then we have none/very little hard drive stock, with no expected re-supply in any kind of volume. This causes our entire business to grind to a halt. We can't support corporate and enterprise customers, we can't build PC's to sell to consumers, and we won't have any drives to sell to customers that really need it. More importantly we loose the trust of people who rely on us to supply them.

So keep going on about "lol sheep" if you want. It's not for the sake of profit. There are serious ramifications for retailers if they don't maintain stocks of hard drives.

 

/me looks at 6xWD20EARS+4xWD20EARX, checks local prices (190e for both types), puts the number in calculator, result is 1900e, /me faints

Edit: Fixed the 2nd hard drive type.

 

When I have the time I'll post what I paid and what they are worth today.

 

I paid 300 for 4xWD20EARX, 300 for 2xWD20EARS (year and half ago) and i'm pretty sure the remainig 4 were around 100 per piece. That is ~1000€ in total. So the value pretty much doubled .

 

And this is a good reason that we should have some HDD factories in Europe somewhere, preferably somewhere above sea level. The monsoon and tropical storms are a fact of life in the far east, they are annual events, are we as consumers going to have a knife held at our throats everytime nature decides to do what she does and by chance hits a country that supplies computer electronics? If so then perhaps the HDD manufacturers should consider relocating some of their factories to another drier part of the world.

It makes no sense at all to keep all your eggs in one basket, it harms your business and the businesses of the people you supply with your finished product.

 

Yeah, but how much would the staff wages be? H&S legislation, taxes etc etc?

Thailand has cheap labour and I'm sure that none of the H&S legislation is anywhere near as stringent as ours is!

Andy

 

Yeah but least we have plenty of high ground and know how to deal with water, afterall we're an island. Besides the factory need not be located in the UK, there's plenty of countries in Europe sitting way above sea level and they don't hit businesses with half the crap that they do here in the UK. Just locating a factory or two here in Europe, could prevent the starvation the industry is suffering as a result of the Thailand floods.

 

So, where in Europe exactly do you plan this. I guess you want it in EU, then your options are rather limited. Even in the least paid countries, you will have to give the workers ~300e as a minimal monthly salary. Which is i guess much much more than the guys at Thailand get. Unless of course you wish to pay a lot more for hard drives. Oh wait, that is now . Prices you see now are probably the prices you would see for European-made hard drive due workforce costs.

 

Ouuuch.
I'm about to fill my 5tb's and was planning on getting a nas with another 5-6tb. That's definately not happening now, not for a couple years it sounds.
Guess I should start some cleaning... stick some old stuff on dvd-r (I have a whole stack of 50 just sitting around)

 

Just when I needed to order a new build, HDD price will take a big chunk out the budget for it.

Shame.

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...le-bracing-for-worst-in-thai-floods-tech.html

I start to feel lucky for getting four WD20EARX drives few weeks before the price increase for 75€ each .

 

Looking at the price of Blurays they don't seem so bad anymore as a storage media. ~600GB for $25 if you've got access to a burner.

I'm lucky enough to know someone who's laptop can burn BRs, worst case scenario this is my plan.

 

Looks around i have alot of spare drives, any failed drives will be replaced under warranty from now on, it not be that bad.