Let’s face it: the recent flooding situation in Thailand and the imminent hard drive shortage has many of us concerned, as approximately 40-50% of the world’s hard disk drives are manufactured in the affected areas. With production halted, suppliers and customers alike are worried about the impact this may have on hard drive availability, not to mention the looming price increases on currently available units.
While damage assessments from these major memory component manufacturers in Thailand are trickling in, several plants still remain submerged from the floods and photos capture the still “soggy” situation for Nikon’s factories, as crews work fervently to pump out the excess water from the area with generators. Aerial footage also demonstrates the severity of the situation and the long clean-up ahead:
A Simple Solution
Last week we discussed how to make the most of what you have by utilizing older, possibly forgotten, hard disk drive solutions to store your files now and in the future if you need to do so. If you’re using the Newer Technology Voyager or USB Universal Drive Adapter, a cool accessory like NewerTech’s StoraDrive is a simple way for keeping those drives organized for such future uses. After all, in light of recent events, you can never be too prepared…
Hard drives are definitely not an endangered specie. The smaller capactiy drives up to 1 TB will be replaced by Ssd’s but larger storage drives are just more cost effective and I imagine it will stay this way for the next few decades. In Spain where I live importers have gouged the consumer with a 50-75% increase in all drves across the board. Ssd’s, internal, and external drives. This unfair trade practice was applied to millions of units that were already in Europe sitting in containers in ports and warehouses! The shops have passed increase to customer. Shameful! Hitachi and other companies manufacture in China and even those drives are affected. I am trying not to buy anything for the over the next month as protest against this avarice.
It’s a tough bit. While I know first hand certain Distributors that went in to total gouge mode, the increases from the manufacturers were less. Also – you have a lot of gray market brokers that supply the deep discounters that suddenly could get no product cause there wasn’t any. Those guys feed off of bigger buys that buy really big and then need to side ways move stuff to keep their turn going, but have to buy big to get the lower cost. We often see drives sold below our cost and that’s a lot to do with that. But back to the price increases – there is a shortage and system builders, data centers, etc that have to have product and are willing to pay more to get their chunk of the smaller pool of drives. And while some distributors are just robbers and unethical, most have been reasonable with what is still a larger mark up (on top of the manufacturer’s increases) that has to take into account that they only have limited supply to sell and once gone – it’s gone for weeks or months depending on the item. The entire situation is horrible – and by January should be getting better.
so all the hard drives, or there components manufactured on the planet earth come from this area. This is not a good business practice. how did the industry let this happen. Oh I know greed. The americans got paid too much in the 70s, the Japanese got to much in the 90s so let find the cheapest labor on the cheapest land to build, in the cheapest Taxing nation on earth. Great business plan.
HDDs are a cutthroat, low-margin business. Given the rapid SSD takeover of the higher-end market, it’s likely the rebuilding / repairing these facilities will not end up being cost effective over their remaining useful life. This may lead to an accelerated SSD transition, rather than HDD availability ever coming back to what it was, with HDDs becoming more of a niche product for bulk data storage (“disk is the new tape”).
That’s a lot of water.