[Somnambulist]

If you hadn't noticed, prices of mechanical hard drives have skyrocketed because of flooding in Thailand wrecking, and in some cases writing off entire production lines. It seems most HDDs or vital components for them are made there and the HDD industry has been crippled, badly. Prices are expected to keep on rising and it could be 6 months or even a year before things start to return to normal. Very bad news if you're looking to buy a load of hard drives, or indeed any kind of mechanical HDD. 
 
I was going to buy 4 2TB HDDs for my microserver. What would have cost me £296 a few weeks back would now set me back £696... an expense I can't really justify. So much for my digital library for the time being.

 

[Elysian]

I'm building someone a new computer for Christmas, and when I specced things out, I saw that 2TB HDDs have increased by 54% in price from earlier this year ($130 to $200 for WD Caviar Blacks)!  I think I will probably just use an unused RMAed drive from before since some reports are saying these prices won't go down until early 2012 at the earliest.

 

[Hennyo]

I'm just fortunate I actually ordered my next 2tb days before the flood...
 
Lucky I guess.. Yea, I would not buy them at this price. =/ My Samsung F4's are $110$ when they were 65..... Don't buy. Eventually we'll return to normal.

 

[Head Injury]

Well, guess that rules out RAID0 for the time being 

 

[Uncle Erik]

I simply hope the people in Thailand are able to survive this.

 

[Somnambulist]

Yeah, people have lost their lives and in likelihood a lot more will lose their livelihoods if companies decide to start building lines elsewhere. This is just moaning about first-world problems. It could be pretty bad if it gets to the stage where people have defective drives and can't replace them via warranty because there are simply none to replace them with. Businesses will be getting first dibs with drives as well so supply could well dry up completely.

 

[Handy Ray]

Well, prices ought to return to normal after this mess is sorted out.  This was probably the worst flooding in Thailand in many many many years.  A good reminder to not concentrate and monotonically build anything anywhere.  Do what nature does, build a variety of things interlaced with whatever naturally grows there to hedge your bets against natural disasters like this.

 

[Elysian]

The problems with your assumption is that:
- The HDD market is declining YoY (the growth in storage is coming from SSDs, which includes the flash storage everyone takes for granted on their smartphones and tablets)
- A cottage industry for HDD manufacturing components has grown around where the largest manufacturing hubs are
- A further migration of HDD manufacturing factories to low-cost labor areas (generally not going to be seeing these devices made in Japan, Korea, or Taiwan)
- Consolidation of the HDDs to a handful of companies (all the other previous players have sold their HDD businesses, from IBM to Hitachi), further aggravated by:
  - Lack of entrants due to a high startup costs
  - No desire for people to enter a market that continues to contract
  - Consumer preference for price over technology, giving incumbents a significant advantage
  - Only a handful of large buyers (such as Apple, Dell, and HP), making it extremely difficult for a new company to stand up to Samsung, Seagate, and WD

 

[Uncle Erik]

No sympathy for the people in Thailand? Flooding is awful. It doesn't matter if hard drive prices increase.

I'm disappointed that people care more about prices than people.

 

[Henry Flower]

Quote:

No sympathy for the people in Thailand? Flooding is awful. It doesn't matter if hard drive prices increase.
I'm disappointed that people care more about prices than people.

This is the Computer Audio forum on head-fi.  Hard drive prices are relevant.  People who work(ed) in hard drive factories or who have otherwise directly suffered from the floods are unlikely to come here looking for sympathy.  The Members' Lounge is the place to discuss the floods generally.

 

[Handy Ray]

Perhaps.  The performance HDD market is dwindling mostly because of SSDs.  The capacity HDD market for purposes like file storage, NAS, media serving, etc is still big, and in fact, might even expand given their relative price (before flood) and the availability of NAS systems.
 
I don't think the performance HDD market will be nearly as big after this recovery (>March 2013), but the large size HDDs should do fine. 
 
So hopefully prices will come crashing down.  And besides, most of the price increase you have observed at Newegg and so on are mostly done to throttle demand to outlast the shortage since every manufacturer decided to go on allocation basis for big OEM's first.  The supply price (at the time of Newegg price hike) hasn't actually changed.  You are seeing the same thing at your gas pumps, FYI.

 

[Somnambulist]

Western Digital are saying 7 quarters before stability returns.

 

[Somnambulist]

I believe 4 out of 7 lines are now clear of water in WD's case. How long before they start running again... no idea.
 
I ended up finding a 2TB external for a decent price and am currently ripping an bunch of CDs a day to ALAC, with the intention of eventually migrating the files to my server when internal drive prices return to normal and I can stick half a dozen in that. Once that's done I'll keep the external for Time Machine use or something. It'll have to do for now but at least it means I should have all my music digitised by the new year and can then twiddle my thumbs while I make AAC copies of everything for the portable rig.

 

[Squa7ch]

I bought a 2TB Western Digital Green a couple months before this happened, seen the price go up as much as $230

 

[CardasHD650]

Yeah from £40 for a 2TB to £160 in the matter of weeks.... . . . The shops over here must be laughing their socks off at us now :/