The impending hard drive shortage -- and possible price hikes

[Renew Deal]

If you're going to need hard drives this year or early next year, it would be smart to get your sources locked in now.

Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand -- notably including the largest Western Digital plant -- were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online. Thailand is a major manufacturer of hard drives, and the shutdowns have reduced the industry's output by 25 percent.

Western Digital, the largest hard disk manufacturer, makes more than 30 percent of all hard drives in the world. Its plants in Ayutthaya's Bang Pa-In Industrial Estate and Pathum Thani's Navanakorn Industrial Estate together produce about 60 percent the company's disks. Both were shut down last Wednesday. (Western Digital also has a major plant in Malaysia that hasn't been affected by the floods, so some production will likely shift to that plant.)
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/hard-drives/the-impending-hard-drive-shortage-and-possible-price-hikes-176453

Don't know if this is a real crisis or just alarmist, but I'm sure people will find it interesting.

[Tesha]

1. Hard drives are becoming obsolete, replaced by Solid State Drives (SSD).

As Flash memory comes down in price, there'll be less
and less reason to use spinning platters to store data.

Tesha

[golfguru]

2. Can you please shed more light on these SSD's ?

Cost?
capacity?
Thanks.

[jberryhill]

3. shopping.google.com

enter "solid state drives"

The wonderful thing about them is high reliability due to no moving parts.

[AikidoSoul]

4. Hard drives will be used for a long time. Solid state hard drives will take a long time to dominate

the market. Western Digital makes solid state drives too, so any disruption in manufacturing will affect solid state items as well.

Thanks for the heads up.

[Tesha]

5. Western Digital manufactures at five different sites.

WT Singapore
WS Singapore
WM Malaysia
WR United States
WC Thailand

It wouldn't be surprising to find that the SSDs
(which use wildly different manufacturing practices)
are manufactured at a different site than the
magnetic disk drives.

Tesha

[marmar]

6. If we made things in this country, maybe this wouldn't be such a big deal.

nt