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PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives
Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."
We're short on hard drives, and the factory workers are short on homes because of flooding.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
... because just before drive production went offline I finally outfitted my new home server with 9TB of storage for just $420. Pretty much my entire life, it's been that once I go and buy some computer hardware, two weeks (or however long the return period is) later, the price is guaranteed to be cut significantly (or a much better version is released).
Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
isn't a totally free market GREAT??
When you consider that it resulted in a price drop for 2TB HDDs from $250 or so in 2010 to $75 as of 3 months ago, yes, it is great.
The "spike in prices" is only a spike because of how cheap everything had gotten, and it only got so cheap because of heavy competition. Second guessing things and claiming it would have been better with heavier regulation and restricted ability to outsource is moronic.
Actually, you CAN plan for this. By, you know, not putting 75% of the entire world's manufacturing of hard drive motors into a single location.
Hopefully this will become a case study for how diversification of supply chain can be immensely profitable - if any one of those companies had split their factories 50/50 with another location, they could basically print money for the next 12 months by undercutting the entire rest of the market by 50% (which would still be above what prices were before the flooding)
It's amazing how companies don't learn - Toyota & Honda did the exact same thing by having a diverse set of models instead of focusing only on gas-guzzling SUV's, and all of a sudden when gas prices skyrocketed they made a fortune.
I might be wrong, but I feel, really feel like the flooding wasn't that big factor
but rather its great excuse to jack up the prices.
I remember similar story about RAM and Taiwan earthquake, when it was found out that damages to facilities were really minimal.
Wish it was a scam... but I cannot help but feel sorry for their loss. Please check out these pics, showing the damage done, I haven't been able to find any newer pics, but the damage is beyond bad.
To address your concerns on this hdd scam, I present pics of from a Western Digital production plant:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/11/1/photo-horrific-images-of-flooded-western-digital-factory.aspx
I couldn't bring myself to look for pictures/video from the surrounding area, but my heart does go out to them.
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/12/02/western-digital-lifts-dec-qtr-view-restarts-thai-mfg-shrs-up/
Why isn't China in the hard drive business?
That's actually a very good question.
There's an parallel situation with semiconductor manufacturing. There's a interesting paucity of foreign companies with fabs in China.. There's only about three entries from foreign companies. All the other fabs in China belong to the native Chinese company SMIC, which has substantial state investment... as well as a history of IP-theft lawsuits.
It's almost as if semiconductor manufacturing corporations were smart enough to foresee the long-term consequences of building up their own future competitors.
You've obviously not used a machine with the OS and apps on a SSD.
I will not be getting another computer without a SSD.
Sure, for bulk data, such as music, movies and photos, these all live on spinning disks, but for things where latency and throughput matters, SSDs are more than worth the additional cost.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
You'd be crazy (or just too rich to care I suppose) if you wanted your media collection to live on SSD, but even for that hybrid disks are pretty good in a lot of usage scenarios.
You'll also get little to no benefit putting SSDs on a RAID controller - most RAID controllers are optimised for the access times and throughput of regular hard disks, even if in this case regular means a 15k RPM SAS disk.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
They are neither over priced or overrated. Just misunderstood.
Gen 1 was shit, much like the first automobiles. Just a curiosity for the early adopters and extremophiles. The latest ones are not really over priced. That's just what it costs, which reflects what the market will bear. Sure, there might be price fixing, but for what it *is*, it seems reasonable depending on the model and features.
It is most certainly not overrated. The performance increase is quite substantial over spinning media. Form factor and density are pretty darn good too. Let's not forget that with no moving parts you don't have to worry about letting it fall. Of course, spinning media has some features to mitigate that, but SSD mitigates it by fundamental design.
My own laptop has a small 64GB SSD and two 1TB "normal" drives. The responsiveness of the OS *skyrocketed*. You don't need huge SSDs. The smallest SSD on market would probably suffice.
This is where they are misunderstood. With proper configuration you can move all user data to the larger cheaper drives and use the SSD for core files and temporary storage/cache. Even with Windows 7 bloated to all hell I still have a lot of programs installed (faster to have their files on the SSD too) with almost 1/3rd of the drive free. It's nice to not have to defrag either. With TRIM support the reliability and lifetime of the drive goes up quite a bit too.
Where they are not overrated at all is server applications. You can build a very very fast DB server with some SSD's. So there are valid enterprise use cases for SSDs when you compare their costs against vastly more expensive solutions delivering higher I/O and throughput such as the ioDrive2. There are quite a few drawbacks to a PCI-E implementation of SSD that can balance against the resultant bottleneck of the SATA bus. However, with 6 GB/s SATA that is less of a concern and there are some pretty decent SATA RAID controllers that can better handle the load. For a number of database applications you don't need a large amount of space, but higher performance. Build a RAID with cheaper and more affordable 64GB SSDs with a decent controller ($1500-200$) and you have a storage solution at about 25% of the cost of the enterprise PCI-E SSD solutions.
Like I said, very misunderstood.
The vast majority of people would see a tangible and cost justified benefit simply be using it for the core OS files. I know I am.
Uh, all the eggs were not in one basket. I heard figures of around 10-20% of world hard drive production that was in Thailand. Not even sure that ALL the production in Thailand was affected. Then there is sub-component production, which complicates the picture.
The real problem is that there wasn't excess capacity. Also, the just-in-time inventory fad where nobody actually stocks anything any more makes any disturbance like this much more critical. But mostly I think there are elements in the manufacturing, distribution, and retailing chain that are orgasmic about the opportunity for gouging afforded by the disturbance. As always, it's very difficult to pinpoint the profiteers, but they are clearly there.
Hope you guys are enjoying the invisible hand of the ingrown corrupt super-capitalist market which you worship. It's more like an invisible phallus raping you in your sleep.
I have a friend out there who's been sending photos. His entire ground floor is flooded. He ran out of food last week and had to go out to get more. This involved swimming from his house, with a crocodile (or possibly alligator, I'm not sure which you get in Thailand) watching him from the opposite side of the canal (apparently it attacked a few people, but no one was killed). This doesn't sound like the ideal conditions for getting the raw materials or workers to the factory, and shipping the finished product would be quite a literal description. Oh, and his landline Internet has been down for over a month, but he's able to use 3G.
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