Flooding in Thailand could see hard drive prices skyrocket

[jgreco]

There's flooding in Thailand. Why do you care? Because that's where a large number of hard drives come from.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/hard-dri...rive-shortage-and-possible-price-hikes-176453

If you're pondering a hard drive purchase, you might want to act fairly quickly, before prices jump.

 

[HolyK]

Flooding in Thailand could see hard drive prices skyrocket ​

As much as our world is dependent on computers of various sizes and form factors, sometimes the original “computer” of mother nature can conflict with our modern lifestyle in unexpected ways. It turns out that some serious flooding in Thailand of late is seriously effecting worldwide hard drive supplies. As Thailand is a significant center for hard drive manufacturing, this has already put some strain on supplies, and production has already been lowered by 25 percent.

Whole article: here

It's already happening. Here, in Czech republic, the prices of all hard drives are crazy! For example, WD20EARX 2TB was 1990CZK yesterday, today it's 3840CZK !!!!!!!!

1990CZK = ~110$
3840CZK = ~213$

Its more than 100$ !!!!

I was waiting only for the memory restock and now, they are here, but my build cost 10.000CZK (~555$) more than yesterday !!!


I'm really angry right now

I hope this is only temporary ...

 

[ProtoSD]

Wow, that sucks! Well, grab some old drives if you can and start testing with those and hopefully the prices will return to normal price soon.

 

[Durkatlon]

Sounds like the Czech situation is more likely opportunistic price gouging.

 

[HolyK]

WD20EARX 2TB is now for 4.698CZK = ~250$

I hope this is only the bad dream ...

 

[ProtoSD]

I just looked here, I'm not sure if they've increased in cost, but they are $125 (2,243.12 CZK). There is a limit of only 1 per customer.

I just looked some more and they can be found $70 here. You could buy them here and pay shipping and still have them for less than there!

 

[Gnome]

Sounds like the Czech situation is more likely opportunistic price gouging.

The same is happening in South Africa. Prices went up fair amount with importers admitting that they are "pre-emptively" increasing the prices

 

[Bohs Hansen]

prices doubled in denmark today

 

[ProtoSD]

Here's an interesting article about the Western Digital plants in Thailand with pictures of the flooding.

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/miscellaneous/thailand-floods-to-significant-impact-wd

All HDD manufacturers - but Samsung - and a lot of components' makers are afffected and it's also a drama for their hundreds of thousands of employees. 25% of all HDD assembly facilities are located in Thailand.

WD is the number one manufacturer in the world in units shipped and producing 60% of its units in Thailand, mainly for PCs. Competitors Seagate, Hitachi GST, Samsung and Toshiba could take advantage of the situation.

 

[Bohs Hansen]

wish i had ordered the 4 new hdds i need a week'ish ago... :)

 

[c0d3m4st4]

same in Spain, at least in the shop i use to buy... just checked, and WD20EARS went from 69.90 eur to 139,30 eur :O

 

[jazz_]

don't worry, western digital has also a hd factory in malaysia, seagate is in thailand too

 

[leeleatherwood]

2 Months ago I bought 8 brand new 2TB Hitachi 5K3000's for $60 each at CompUSA.

Now Newegg has them for $209 each.

Total Price 09/10/2011 $480
Total Price 11/9/2011 $1672

I sure did get lucky!

 

[jazz_]

I found most harddisks are now up 30%, I guess thai production will be back at normal levels after chinese newyear 2012

 

[ProtoSD]

I'd be very cautious buying disks from them for awhile after they begin production again. There are bound to be production problems after being down for so long.

It's too bad that the other manufacturers NOT in Thailand have jacked up their prices too. I hope the extra $$ they're making goes toward improving their disks. I'm looking forward to a new technology discovered by HP I think, and being developed in Europe, called 'memristors'. It ought to provide some nice high capacity solid state disks when they get it finished.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html

 

[jazz_]

the quality of harddisks now is quite crap, all > 1TB drives heavily depend on error correction methods, older drives up to 500gb are more solid.
I haven't find a 1TB drive yet which not fails in 6 months

 

[Durkatlon]

the quality of harddisks now is quite crap, all > 1TB drives heavily depend on error correction methods, older drives up to 500gb are more solid.
I haven't find a 1TB drive yet which not fails in 6 months

I think you need to look into heat-related issues with your setup. I've had 8 1TB drives happily spinning away in 2 NAS enclosures for years without any failures (WD Greens).

Back when I was just piling drives into cases I had a failure every couple of months, but the heat mitigation was terrible in those setups. These were 500 and 750GB disks. When I put the same drives into removable drive sleds that each had a little fan built in, all the crashes stopped.

 

[jazz_]

I think you need to look into heat-related issues with your setup. I've had 8 1TB drives happily spinning away in 2 NAS enclosures for years without any failures (WD Greens).

Back when I was just piling drives into cases I had a failure every couple of months, but the heat mitigation was terrible in those setups. These were 500 and 750GB disks. When I put the same drives into removable drive sleds that each had a little fan built in, all the crashes stopped.

Thanks for the suggestion, i will do a test with a set (2 ) 1T drives and put them outside the cpu case to see if the mtbf will go up
Of course this will be a long term test, but i will report my findings here
Normally s.m.a.r.t reports between 34'c(night) and 37'c(day) no big temperature differences.

regards
Jazz, Saigon

 

[jgreco]

We just received the following from Seagate regarding Thailand.

Special Update â Thailand flooding impacts disk drive industry

As has been widely reported, the severe flooding in Thailand is a tragic situation for families and businesses across the region. To aid in the relief and recovery efforts, Seagate is donating US$1 million across a few key organizations in Thailand.

With regard to Seagate business operations in Thailand, our component and drive assembly factories are operational and accessible. Our production is not constrained by either internal component supply or by our ability to assemble finished
products. Rather, we are constrained by the availability of specific externally sourced components. Seagate now expects to ship 41 million to 45 million hard drives in the current quarter, a change from the prior projection of 40 million to 50 million units.

Throughout the entire industry, demand will significantly outstrip supply at least for the December quarter and the supply disruption will continue for multiple quarters. Unconstrained demand was expected to be approximately 180 million units for the December 2011 quarter. It is now expected that industry shipments will be limited to approximately 110 to 120 million units.

As such, our business priorities are focused on supporting our external component suppliersâ efforts to rebuild the supply chain as quickly as possible, and to work with customers to strategically align their near- and long-term requirements to our production capability. We are aligning our production schedules and product builds to best support both our suppliers and our customers. Our product roadmap has not changed. Continue to refer to the SPP Partner Portal <http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/partners?cmpid=emc_thailandrelief_SPP> for the most recent roadmap.

Please understand that this is an evolving situation that we are diligently monitoring on a daily basis. Foremost in our minds is the tragic nature of this disaster, and our thoughts are with those personally affected.

Seagate Technology LLC 10200 S. De Anza Blvd Cupertino, CA 95014 USA

 

[rnicolas]

The best price I have seen so far is this 1TB drive at Bestbuy for only 54.99.