The ongoing shortage of hard disk drive supply is expected to worsen and peak in early 2012, analysts expect.
Gus Richard from Piper Jaffray told Cnet that "we could run out of drives by the end of November."
Caused by the dramatic flooding in Thailand, hard drive prices have already shot up by 10 to 60 percent, but Richard is concerned that PC manufacturers especially are not taking enough precaution to deal with the shortage.
"Nobody seems to be really paying attention. Everyone overreacted to the disaster in Japan. And now I think they're underreacting," he told Cnet. The estimate is that supply will fall about 60 million units short of a demand of 180 million drives and PC manufacturers will not be not able to meet demand with the units they can produce.
However, while Richard believes that shipments could drop by 5 to 10 million units because of the shortage, the supply problem is likely to spill over into Q1 2012 and affect 10 to 20 million units. In Q1, the expected shortage may be between 60 to 80 million units as lack of supply in Q4 is carried over into the new year.
i mean i was thinking of getting 2 2tb drives, and having one back up the other, but if hdds go away completely... i may have to stock up on them and than ebay.
This shortage will drive up demand across the board for disks, so SSDs shouldn't drop at all for a while, because they will start filling the void of cheap storage without low price per gigabyte hard disks. Nobody really wins because WD and friends would have made more money with 50% more drives sold at the old prices than they will at the inflated prices.
I think he was saying 2/3 as in 750GB, would make a bit more sense imo.
I see drives every day on newegg that are 3 times as much as they were a month ago. That's not 60%, that is 300% increase in price.
In particular, I'm talking about drives that were low end anyway, 500GB or less. The larger drives (1.5TB and up) are the wisest investment right now, although I won't be buying any until this all works out.
A 3TB drive was $200, now it is $300. That's a 50% increase, in case anyone is wondering..
:|
Plenty of hard drives are not produced in Thailand, but they are still effected. The ones still produced are members of a smaller supply. The only way to stop a true shortage is to increase the price, therefore all the HDD are now more expensive.