NetApp, Lenovo Raise Prices, Citing Thailand Flooding Effects

Lucas123 writes "First HP, then EMC, and now NetApp has hiked up the price of its hard disk drives by 5% to 15%. The vendors sent letters to users stating that the flooding in Thailand had caused major component shortages, and while they tried to absorb the supplier price increases, each had to eventually give in. Lenovo also announced it has run out of certain drives for its PC systems including some popular 7,200rpm models."

Comments

Re:I'm starting to wonder about this

[beelsebob]

No, they're seriously saying that a lot of production was there, and that if you take even 40% of production away, you still have major shortages. You don't build plants to produce nearly twice as many drives as there's demand for, just because it may be that some massive natural disaster comes along.

Contrast with consumer hard drive prices

[shoppa]

All the consumer hard drive retailers (e.g. Newegg, microcenter, anywhere) hiked hard drive prices by 200-400% months ago as a response to the floods. I know the big name storage vendors spend less on spinning media and more on, well, overhead and profits, but they come out looking like good guys if they only hiked their prices 5 to 15 percent.

Re:Contrast with consumer hard drive prices

[itsme1234]

First of all at least please read the link you provided: "iSuppli also said the flooding may have affected operations of Nidec Corporation, a Japanese company that supplies more than 70 per cent of the motors in global hard drives."

Then, even if the numbers you quote are right I don't see any indication for "cartel pricing" or "gouging" or anything else. The fact is PAYING CUSTOMERS don't think the prices are high enough and they literally just don't stop buying. If you try to sell a now a drive at the "normal" price or even twice that it will just sell out and literally there aren't enough drives in the world to keep the drives on the shelves at prices before "crisis".
There is no arbitrary limit at which prices would stop. Even a difference of 1% between supply and demand can increase prices 10 (or 100) times if the customer just don't STOP BUYING.

Re:I'm starting to wonder about this

[Hadlock]

Someone famously said that the distance between the platter and the read head is roughly equivilent to flying a 747 over Mt Everest with one inch to spare. It's not like joey and bubba can buy two pallets of platters, three pallets of drive cases, and a pallet of controller assemblies, a gallon of glue and assemble 20K drives in their garage over a weekend while burning through a pack of cigarettes. These aren't cuban sweat shop cigar factories, these devices are put together in enormous clean rooms with super tight tolerances.

Re:Imagine...

[Gadget_Guy]

I'm in the minority where we actually wear computers out (not just the disks), even when we could afford new ones. I'm not doing more demanding tasks than I was 5 years ago, so whats wrong with a 5 year-old computer?

How about a bit of compassion for those Russian hackers who are also using your computer. Why should they have to put up with sub-standard hardware to run their botnet?

Jeez, some people just have no sense of helping the community!

But seriously, I think that in this day of ever more powerful smartphones, an increasing number of people are wearing their computers out.