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."

Comments

Re:Something wrong here...

[Kjella]

1. Big OEM contracts agreed long in advance takes priority, so everything had to be absorbed by the spot market which is much smaller.
2. If you don't have a HDD, you practically can't sell a new machine and for many commercial services not buying is not an option.
3. As smart people in the market realize what was about to happen, they made sure to buy now "just in case" emptying the market.
4. Even OEMs started to fear the shortage and started buying HDDs in the spot market as insurance.

Sum of all of the above = it probably took a 300% price hike until sales dropped 25% to match supply. Spot sales probably had to drop 50-80% for that to happen.

Re:Market pressures.

[bloodhawk]

we had server purchases seriously delayed, in the end we had to go with some more expensive and larger disks just so we could get our desperately needed servers delivered, otherwise it was expected up to a further 3 months of delays.