Slashdot Mirror
Hard Drive Prices Slide As Thai Flood Aftermath Subsides
New submitter yeszomgpony writes "For the first time since the Thailand flooding, hard drive prices are finally starting to decrease. The price jump was kicked off in October when drive inventory levels plummeted 90% in less than a week. From the article: 'Over the past few weeks, hard drive prices have leveled off and have begun to drop slowly, according to Dynamite's data. "For first time, less than week after Western Digital's first [fabrication plant] went back on line, drive inventory began increasing at both distributors and ecommerce sites, and index prices began coming down a little too," Kubicki said. IDC has predicted that hard disk drive supply shortages in the wake of Thailand flooding would affect consumers, computer system manufacturers and corporate IT shops into 2013.'"
This often happens when a process goes off line for a time. It also normally works itself out after a few months.
I'll be waiting a few months myself.
Goes to prove yet again how the "free market", that weird beast so idolized by economists, is such a fickle creature. Cause after over several months underwater, there is NO way you are gonna get a clean room facility up to snuff & speed in a matter of days. Of course, now that the excuse is over, all the hoarding speculators are trembling in fear of getting stuck with their huge stockpile and will start to desperately flood the market.
The camera world, OTOH, was hit pretty heavily by the tsunami. All of the big manufacturers lost significant chunks of their production capacity, and the effects are still being felt in terms of shortages, delays in introducing new models, etc...