Saturday, November 5th 2011
![Western Digital](https://tpucdn.com/images/news/wdc-v1723816949774.png)
Thailand Floods: HDD Prices To Remain Extortionately High As Supplies Get Tighter
The recent dreadful flooding in Thailand has forced the closure of several hard drive factories. The immediate concerns of course, are for the health and wellbeing of the people living and working in the area. The wider concern is the severe restriction in hard drive manufacturing capacity. Already, prices have doubled or tripled, depending on the exact model affected. The biggest HD manufacturer, Western Digital, has been hit the hardest, as IDC predicts that up to 75% of its production will be shut down. This means, that the big corporate HDD customers, those like HP and Dell, who build computer systems in large volumes, will get whatever inventory is available to fully satisfy their needs. Whatever is left is then sold on to the retail channel, for ordinary consumers to buy. IDC believes that hard disk production will reach pre-flood levels by around March, but that HDD levels by then will be very low. The prices should go through the roof then, in the meantime. As expected, this will also increase the prices of complete systems, as such a price hike is too much to absorb fully.
Source:
Network World
94 Comments on Thailand Floods: HDD Prices To Remain Extortionately High As Supplies Get Tighter
This destroys many of my plans... I had at least 12 HDDs that I wanted to buy. Sucks for me... Though it does suck even worse for Thailand
Either way, please people, try not to thread-crap, especially in news posts... Use private communication or what's wrong with the forum?" thread
I hope HDD manufacturers learned their lesson about putting too many eggs in one basket. Yes, labor might be cheap there but when there's a 144% increase in commedity price, most people aren't going to buy.
Less than 25% of HDDs are manufactured in Thailand, so there is most definitely a case for price gouging going on.
It's yet another typical response by businesses to turn a human tragedy into a profit margin.
That said, it is true that WD in particular has invested a lot of their operations in Thailand, but this is far less true for the other manufacturers (Seagate in particular).
www.crn.com/news/storage/231902425/thailand-floods-to-lead-to-30-percent-shortfall-of-hard-drive-supply.htm;jsessionid=PLXGYIguWUTRR-RLiUisPg**.ecappj01
I wonder if that's just a local thing, or a gamble on customers not looking at the similarities between external and internal drives?
I have just bought 2x 2Tb drives and managed to get them at a good price, you can still find the odd drive or external drive at the same price as they were though they really are few and far between, on a different note at least I can sell my 2 500Gb wd5000aaks drives for more than I bought them for :o
how can i save all my files?