News Western Digital warns of continued HDD shortages

Things not back to normal until September, then...

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/01/24/wd-warns-hdd-shortages/1

 

Even if production was back to normal today, prices will still be a rip off for months as WD will need to recoup it's lost profits somehow.

Until the accounts are balanced to pre flood levels, prices will not fall much.

 

yup, it's going to take a lot longer than until the end of this year until prices are what they used to be.

 

Won't affect prices for a while probably like the above have said. So glad I got a 2TB drive before the shortages.

 

Why do other hard drive brands continue to be expensive if WD was the only factory affected by floods?

 

Supply and demand -

Overall supply is less and the demand is the same, therefore higher prices.

 

There are only two manufacturers of HDD's now, and they both have their factories in Thailand.

 

This is how it is now.

 

yup, and imo it was completely idiotic of them to do it like that. seriously, just because you have a competing product it doesn't mean you have to actually be neighbors. they're FACTORIES not retail stores. i'm not against both of them using thailand for placement of their factories but they could have been a lot more separated geographically.

 

That is not true, There are a lot of HDD factories worldwide, most of them in Thailand and China.

 

Except the fact, that WD has to sell some Hitachi stuff first :
"Out of concern for the quickly consolidating market, regulators only approved the Western Digital deal after assurances that the company would sell off some its production assets, including a manufacturing plant, and transfer some intellectual property to the new unit being put on the auction block. "

And unfortunately for WDC, the only reason for this is because they sent the letter to EU 1 day later than Seagate/Samsung, so Seagate/Samsung merger was accepted without any questions because they had 2 competitors at the time (WDC & Hitachi), but WDC/Hitachi had only one competitor at the time of merger - Seagate/Samsung... If the order would have been in reverse order, then we are talking now about what Seagate needs to sell from Samsung for successfull merger .

 

Luckily I have allot of blank dual layer DVD's and Blu-Ray's because I have spent the last 2 day's backing up everything as my 2tb drives are failing and they are just out of warranty grr.

I just hope the prices come down in the summer as I need new drives but cannot justify paying the price for them at the moment.

 

Well, i wouldn't complain that much if my oldest 2TB drive would fail. I paid 155 euros for it at the time (2 years ago i think), the current price for a new one is 135 euros so i would either get a newer model of WD20EARS or a refund, which would mean a new WD20EARX + 20 euros .

 

Any suggestions as to the best programs to wipe older drives and get them ready for reuse?
I have several that I could recycle but never knew exactly the best way to go about it.
WD Greenies are still pretty cheap but I'd like to reuse what I have. I don't like trashing perfectly good, just older, electronics.

 

I do plan on getting my hands on 2TB HDD, low spinning just to store but the prices then were a bit high but now are prohibitive! I guess the only inexpensive way to go it's to buy an SSD, even a 256GB model isn't expensive as they were, set it up as boot drive and the HDD used as boot goes to storage, 250GB extra of storage giving me an hypothetically a JBOD RAID of 1TB which isn't bad at all (Have a twin drive (WD RE) and a 500GB Seagate)

 

Yes, let's call things idiotic because we don't understand them. Wanting to be next to their competitor has nothing to do with it. Instead, both hard drive manufacturers built factories in Thailand because it's the most cost effective place to manufacture hard drives. Thailand provides relatively cheap labor while still being advanced enough to provide the necessary infrastructure for making high tech gadgets. In fact, to not build a factory in a financially advantageous location simply because their competitor had a factory in the area would be petty at best and cause increased prices due to having to build in less profitable areas.

The trick is, the floods were a natural disaster. In an area prone to flooding there were preventative measures taken to reduce flood damage and the architects/engineers planning the construction of each factory likely took this into account to make sure their buildings were safe from typical floods. However, this particular flood was far above normal (hence why it's called a natural disaster) and was beyond the scope of the anti flooding measures in the area. You're better of blaming Mother Nature before Seagate or WD.

 

Government subsidies might have had a lot to do with it as well. Would also be great to have your people collectively trained by competitors in the same field.

 

Thanks! Boot & Nuke is a name I haven't heard in years. I looked and I still have a copy on a floppy disk. Time to update since there wasn't even SATA back then! Just a mass of thin, flat, ATA cables, guaranteed to slow your airflow to a standstill.