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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."
...how does a production shortfall of less than 50% result in a price hike of *over 300%*??
This curve should explain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
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Just to elucidate, a x% reduction in amount of HDDs does not translate into an x% increase in price (which is impossible since the units are different). It results in an x% reduction in number of people who can buy HDDs.
Pretend that 100 people want to buy one HDD each. If there are only 50 identical HDDs, that doesn't mean that the price goes up 50% (or 100%). It means that only 50 people can buy HDDs. The other 50 have to go without.
Sort everyone by how much they're willing to pay for a HDD, from lowest to highest. Then the highest price that the 51th person is willing to pay for a HDD is the new market price. If he's willing to pay just 10% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 10%. If he's willing to pay 300% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 300%. His price is higher than the first 50 people are willing to pay, so they choose simply not to buy a HDD at his price. Consequently there are only 50 people left who want to buy HDDs, and only 50 HDDs for sale.
Long story short, it's a 5 platter design and generally they've not been good in the past, too many parts to be reliable. The other manufacturers are probably waiting until they can ship a 4x1TB disk instead of 5x800GB. Hitachi is actually shipping 1x1TB disks in the 4K7000.D and 4K5000.B class, but I guess the yield of perfect platters is too low yet.
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We make systems that have up to 200+TB storage and had to do emergency qualifications of replacement disk drives because the drive vendors told us "sorry, can't deliver." That must be because we have long term purchasing agreements, i.e. prenegotiated prices. I think the bastards rather sold at 3x prices to Newegg & co.
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