HDD Shipments to Drop by 35% in Q4 2011

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Seagate has just lowered its shipment forecast for Q4 again.

The impact of the flood in Thailand is much more dramatic than previously estimated. Along with a 10 to 18 percent decrease to 41 to 45 million units, according to a report published by Digitimes, it appears that the HDD industry's shipments will decline by more than 35 percent in the current quarter.

According to Digitimes, WD, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba will ship only about 103 million units in Q4, down from 162 million in Q3. WD may be hit the hardest, with shipments estimated to be in the 22 to 26 million range, down from 58 million in Q3. Hitachi may drop from 32 million to 20 million and Toshiba from 22 million to 12 million.

According to Seagate, the global demand calls for about 180 million drives in Q4.

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Wolfgang Gruener
34 Comments Comment from the forums
  • MikeyP41077
    Insane.... went online to check out prices the other day and it was $200 for a 2TB drive that was $60 3 months ago. I then went to check out EBay and they were the same price. So you have to love that junk. The people on ebay selling there drives for 3x what they paid for them. What a crock of S*IT!!
    Reply
  • Scoregie
    man this seriously put me out... i'm like screwed need another 2tb for my soon to be server...
    Reply
  • acadia11
    free markets man. Why are you upset?
    Reply
  • fwaits
    Yeah this is hurting enterprises that want to buy some SAN or NAS devices right now. It's like $5/gallon gasoline in the US. heh
    Reply
  • internetlad
    buy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.

    The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.

    Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare.

    Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
    Reply
  • darkguset
    Since the HDD prices are going up, sounds like it is a good time to invest in an SSD!
    Reply
  • nforce4max
    internetladbuy an SSD, and you solve both the problem of an HDD bottlenecking your system, and overpaying for HDDs.The big issue is that everybody thinks they need a TB drive in their PC, which is totally untrue. There are very few situations that call even for the mass of a 500 gb drive. Unless you're pirating tons of music/videos, taking DSLR high res photos and storing thousands of them, or running some manner of home or corporate server, there is no reason you should need even more than 120 GB of storage, even with an install on it.Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know how to properly manage storage space. I recently had to install Arkham City on my PC with a 120 GB SSD, and although I had to clean off some unused items, I managed to make room with about 5 gb to spare. Point is most people just have junk all over their pc.
    Don't come to my house, I fill up drives rather fast. Video projects to other interests like backups ect. Got 8 drives in my game rig, 3x 2TB that I paid $80 a few months ago, 4x 1TB, and a little 30gb ssd that I use for paging.
    Reply
  • Squander
    Where do SSDs get made? Why haven't those been effected?
    Reply
  • littleleo
    SSDs are made from Nand chips, so they are affect when flash RAM prices go up. They have no moving parts. There are 2 main types SLC (1st generation) Single Link Cell very expensive, and the newer MLC Multi linked Cell this is what most of the popular models use. Not as fast or reliable as SLC but a lot cheaper.
    Reply
  • ko888
    SquanderWhere do SSDs get made? Why haven't those been effected?None in Thailand.

    Most are made in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan ,USA.
    Reply