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Hard Drive Shortage Relief Coming In Q1 2012
MojoKid writes "According to new reports [note: source article at DigiTimes], global HDD production capacity is getting ready to increase to 140-145 million units in the first quarter of 2012, or about 80 percent of where it was prior to when the floods hit Thailand manufacturing plants. HDD production was sitting around 175 million units in the third quarter of 2011 before the floods, after which time it quickly dropped to 120-125 million units. Since then, there's been a concerted effort to restore operations to pre-flood levels."
It's great that HDD production is about to increase again, but I think the recent "crunch" was also a good thing in a way. Perhaps it encouraged some end users to get more creative with data storage techniques, resulting in more efficient systems that can do more with less bulk storage capacity. At least I can hope so.
Write failed: Broken pipe
This is kind of old. I'm a college professor in a computer science department. Our students were affected at the beginning of this term (we offer free external hard drives on which to keep their work). About four weeks in, the supply opened back up. We initially issued 16GB flash drives, and now they all have their 320GB USB drives.
Microsoft leads to Bluescreen; Bluescreen leads to downtime; downtime leads to suffering.
Granted, the drop in supply was more abrupt than the restoration of supply, so one would expect prices to follow the same curve.
It may be too much to hope that this leads to more geographic diversity in manufacturing, but I hope it's at least produced some lasting acceleration toward solid-state storage.
It's not all their fault, really. MSPaint doesn't have JPEG support in Windows 98.
relief!
got their heads beaten in back in 2010. i mean, if they had unions or labor laws, there's no telling how high hard drive prices might be.
oh by the way, fight sopa! its about freedom.
...how does a production shortfall of less than 50% result in a price hike of *over 300%*??
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
What's so relieving about:
Due to increased costs of components and materials, HDD prices are likely to rise 30-40% from the level before the floods by the end of 2012, the sources indicated.
-- FTFA
...but, what's keeping 4TB internal drives off the market?
The 4TB Deskstar has been out for a while...where are Seagate and WD?
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I can't wait til Q1 2012 finally comes!
Uhhh... unless they're using some new calendar I'm unfamiliar with, the first quarter is about two-thirds over. The fact that they're using the future tense for something which is already mostly gone makes me wonder just how well informed this article is.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Has there been any data published about the reliability of the drives coming off of the assembly line now? When the drive makers reduced their warranties, there was concern that production after the flooding would have a drop in quality. Has this been borne out, or was it unfounded speculation?
The floods caused, what, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure damage? Who's ultimately going to write the final checks that pay for all the repairs (and likely upgrades)? Don't we know who? It will be every person and company that buys those products and the population of Thailand. Ultimately the entire global economy pays the bulk of the cost. The One Percenters who control those factories damned sure aren't gonna foot much of the bill. So... don't be a fool and expect prices to return to where they would have been otherwise. That will take a decade.
(It's exactly how recessions work: One Percenters feel a pinch in their ability to concentrate wealth, and in a perverse reversal of the Trickle Down theory they make all those they employ suffer instead so that they regain the full extent of that ability. The only difference in this case is that the proximal cause is an obvious natural disaster. Economists have been feeding us lies about such things for decades.)
i'll believe it when i see it (i.e. retail availability and prices back to pre-flood levels)
I was starting to feel spoiled with how low hard drive prices were before the floods. But now, even months after the floors 1TB drives are still more than I paid for 2TB drives before the floods, I don't feel spoiled anymore.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
shortage? i haven't bought one in a couple years
>If anything, economies of scale would have seen to the dramatic drop in production costs and not an increase.
Have you missed the last few decades of decreasing costs for computer hardware? This price increase is just a blip, and it isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened.
>We should all be running 2TB SSD drives by now but instead the greedy HD manaufacturers just want to squeeze every bit of dough out of the old mechanical HD market instead.
This looks like a non sequitur.
Even if all the hard drive companies were fixing prices, what does that have to do with all of us not running 2TB SSDs? If anything rising HD costs would encourage us to seek alternatives.
Solid state storage just costs more per byte than hard drive platters, plain and simple. There is still a huge market for slow HD storage and there will be for years to come. HD companies aren't just going to stop selling hard drives to "make room" for SSDs or whatever when they have huge investments in HD production and willing buyers.
Anyway, eventually we will be running 2TB SSD. I'm on my way there: I have 240GB, at work we just bought 800GB.
Skyrocket the moment they think supply is threatened and then fall back down glacially while waiting for the next disaster or crises. Supply may increase as production ramps up but I'm betting that the middle men and manufacturers will keep prices high for as long as they can. Some manufacturers apparently didn't suffer the same losses but jacked prices up too so this should be no surprise at all...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
An excellent explanation of how markets drive prices, and why a functioning market achieves better results than the imposition of price controls.
(Why is it that I never have mod points when they'd be useful?)
So 140-145million hard drives will end up buried in landfill in Q1-2012! Yay!!!!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
"RAMDISK is definitely an option again for some." - by symbolset (646467) * on Saturday February 25, @02:53AM (#39156737) Homepage
Been 1 of the some per my subject-line above, since 1996 with hardware based "True SSD" tech/not based on FLASH ram tech.
(Plus, @ home since 1991 or so on 16-bit DOS ramdisk.sys, & into 32-bit via software ramdisks based off the MS DDK template, I even did one (GUI front + some 'tweaks' to the base design) as all of them essentially are basically, 32mb in size (lol) & 1997 onward via hardware).
Yes, @ home too in hardware as well since 1997, 1st in the:
1.) CENATEK RocketDrive "True SSD" as I call ones based off of 4gb PC-133 SDRAM/PCI-2.0 bus speeds & 133mb/sec. ATA-EIDE bus, tech
+
2.) Since 2005 onwards also a Gigabyte IRAM 4gb DDR-2 RAM/150mb/sec. SATA I bus.
(BOTH on Windows 7 64-bit operating now too, vs. FLASH today (which used to suffer from HORRIBLE write performance, not so bad now, but, only recently for the most part)).
* They EXCEL in multi-user environs as well, low-latency bigtime, so for instance can you say "DATABASE ENVIRONS ANYONE?" where it really, Really, REALLY matters, and applies itself perfectly.
APK
P.S.=> I've been using them since 16-bit DOS 5.0 16mb sizelimits & all, but, that was "big" then, into the 32-bit world in Windows NT 3.5x- Windows 7 currently (many software ones, & hardware SSD's too thru that entire timeframe 1990-2012 present)...
I use BOTH software &/or hardware ramdisks-ramdrives @ home for better performance (& to a degree/extent, anonymity) to:
1.) Run programs (or data) where latency matters on them
2.) %Temp%\%Tmp% environment variables for OS/Apps is pointed to them
3.) Webbrowser page caching
4.) Windows pagefile.sys (own partition on it also)
5.) Logging
6.) Application temp settings
7.) Application data storage
8.) Print Spooling
9.) Sandboxie location (this one's special because it actually makes it work, and FAST (rarity for it, put it that way))
10.) & also FAR more...
So, do they work @ home for better performance too? Yes, bigtime - & software ones do for security in a way, because some are by default or CAN be set to 'reset' on reboot (totally clean) as well.
For speed though? It's truly noticeably performance-enhancing & massively so in not only being actually orders of magnitudes faster seek/access but also latency...
Still though, the really nicest part/"side-effect" of that is, also for the fact by doing so as I do above, you're also OFFLOADING your mechanical slower HDD's of those tasks too!
(And the apps that use them get latency/seek/access gains as well as IO intensive ones too)
In essence lessening their workloads, caches/buffers of anykind in assisting controllers (as I have in a Promise SuperTrak Ex-8350 128mb ECC RAM onboard for read/write hardware cache on WD SATA II Raptors 10k RPM 16mb buffered Perpendicular Recording Tech utilizing HDD disks).
(Food 4 Thought!)
Been doing it here since 1991 in one way (hardware), shape (software), or form... it works.
Speed up your slowest thing in mechanical HDD's by offloading them, and then using Ramdisks (Hardware) and Ramdrives (Software) to speed up other things & offload the slowest thing in your systems?
You gain a thousandfold by using many thousands of fold faster drives in either hardware SSD, or software ramdisk...
Hey/Again - * I think I mentioned this above, not sure, stream-of-consciousness" going here now (rambling, like you) - I've even built my own software one in 32-bit, and was later favorably cited on CENATEK's webpage front page on it, as well as EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com!
(By also doing work on theirs in code that improved it by up to 40% in performance on its block device driver's caching & HOW TO USE THEM EFFECTIVELY FOR PERFORMANCE, which nowadays is becoming a norm in using them in high TPM environs in DB work
has never been accused of a shortage, but at 64, it could use assistance