Hard drives prices are rocketing up.
It is well known fact that tomorrow's disk drives would be cheaper, on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis, than the ones we can buy today.
The hard disk industry now concentrated mainly around two companies: Western Digital and Seagate. They produce about 90% of the world’s disk drives. Chasing ever-lower costs, both Seagate and Western Digital have moved much of the final assembly of drives to Thailand.
In Thailand located almost a quarter of the world's hard disk manufacturing. Unfortunately, Thailand is now partially under water, facing the worst flooding in the past 50 years. And because of the disaster in Thailand, there is a shortage of these devices. Thus, all factories stopped work for Western Digital and Toshiba. So currently hard drives prices rose up.
Thus HDD 1TB is already 180% more expensive than before, and hard drives with capacity of 1.5 TB and 2 TB - 100% and 80% more expensive respectively.
Experts predict the supply chain for drives and drive components will go dry sometime in the first quarter of 2012. It is possible that that the production shortfall will be as much as 20 million drives a month starting in December.
How long such situation can last? Well, we should expect the improvement only within next 3-5 months. Or even we shall wait until next summer for retail prices to return to recent low levels.
| The water around the factory buildings is more than two meters (6.6 feet) deep, with more than one meter of water inside buildings. | |
