Thailand Floods to Lead to Hard Drive Shortages for Months

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Analysts are predicting a shortage of hard drives until at least 2nd quarter 2012 due to the devastating floods that have ravaged Thailand. Western Digital has been hit the hardest, expecting revenue to be down 60% from last year’s numbers.

Thailand’s disaster has shut down 14,000 factories, flooded hundreds of thousands of homes and put more than 660,000 out of work.
 
I guess I could cut down on the Thai food, if it helps recoop the lost production.

I'm afraid I don't understand your reasoning.


I'm currently working on a project to replace my current NAS server with a FlexRAID setup. I needed one more 3TB WD Green drive when I first heard of the flooding, and I rushed out and bought it on credit (I usually avoid credit, but I felt I needed to get it, or risked going without or paying through the nose if I didn't

I'm glad I did.

I paid $124.99 for mine. Now they are going for $184.99
 
Zarathustra[H];1037922594 said:
I'm afraid I don't understand your reasoning.


I'm currently working on a project to replace my current NAS server with a FlexRAID setup. I needed one more 3TB WD Green drive when I first heard of the flooding, and I rushed out and bought it on credit (I usually avoid credit, but I felt I needed to get it, or risked going without or paying through the nose if I didn't

I'm glad I did.

I paid $124.99 for mine. Now they are going for $184.99
Ah, he fixed the title. It used to read "Thailand Foods to Lead to Hard Drive Shortages for Months"
 
Glad I got my 3TB Hitachi for $85 while the going was good.

Guess this also means that no boom-boom for this falang this November. :(
 
Was waiting for Black Friday to grab a few more drives...Time to clear out the local microcenter.
 
I generally only use WD drives. And now ASI won't even ship them to me, unless it's for full OEM packages, rather than just single sale, which is more common for me. I knew I should have stocked up while they were cheap. Now I'm stuck with buying them from NE sans my distro discount. :(
 
I was wondering why HDD prices were going up a bit...

Hope I don't need much more storage for a while.... 10TB should last...
 
Man, I was like, no need to buy 2TB green drives for $60, I got plenty of space to last me. Now they are tipping $100+ CAD.

/regret
 
This is the third time in 10 years that thailand has been hit by major flooding. :(

Still annoyed that WD bought hitachi, it means theres no where left to buy decent drives anyway. Its annoying that two of the worst HDD makers for performance and reliability ive experienced (WD and shitgate, though WD > Seagate) have bought up the rest of the industry.
 
This is the third time in 10 years that thailand has been hit by major flooding. :(

Still annoyed that WD bought hitachi, it means theres no where left to buy decent drives anyway. Its annoying that two of the worst HDD makers for performance and reliability ive experienced (WD and shitgate, though WD > Seagate) have bought up the rest of the industry.

I've always had good experiences with WD.

I've had mixed experiences with Seagates. And Hitachi's unit (under previous IBM ownership) was what brought us the Deathstar clicking of death...
 
Shit... I needed to order some more Constellation ES drives for our Qnap at work.
 
maybe for once someone to realize outsourcing everything overseas to asian countries is not always in the best interest.
 
So pissed, prices are nearly double on the caviar black drives now because of this.
 
Even $200 for a 3TB is laughably cheap from a historical point of view. $80 is rediculous.

Oh well, maybe give SSD some more market penetration.
 
Glad I got those 8 Hitachi 7200 rpm 3tb drives @ 149 last month. I agree, WD got what they got from going to Thailand for their production -- think about the U.S. and Europe for the next factory.
 
Microcenter still had drives on sale today but was limiting people to two drives. The prices were the same as what was in the ads for October.
 
Give it a few years, and you'll be saying, "I can't believe anyone spent that much money on a measly 3TB drive."

That's true but I don't see that changing any time soon with about any computer components.

I've felt the same about stuff I've bought before but if you want it now the price now is what counts.
 
Glad I got those 8 Hitachi 7200 rpm 3tb drives @ 149 last month. I agree, WD got what they got from going to Thailand for their production -- think about the U.S. and Europe for the next factory.

Sadly it would still be cheaper for their entire factory to explode and have 100,000 dead workers and have to rebuild from scratch than it is for them to have a production plant in the US.

Prices have already climbed on newegg and other places on the web FYI.

1TB blacks went from $69 to $119 over the weekend.
 
Who cares we'll live, hope the thais are ok and the refugees from other countries that live in their shantytowns.
 
Glad I got those 8 Hitachi 7200 rpm 3tb drives @ 149 last month. I agree, WD got what they got from going to Thailand for their production -- think about the U.S. and Europe for the next factory.

Sure, if you want to pay $800 for a 2TB drive, why not make it in the U.S. or Europe. :p

Truth is, low tech production just isn't feasible win the western world. We can only do high tech stuff that requires highly skilled, highly educated and highly trained workforces here and in Europe, because of the salary expectations people here have and the low prices people expect.

You can pay people well, and charge high prices, or pay people less and charge less. Can't have it both ways.

Also, we get floods here in the U.S. too. Just ask the folks at Fort Calhoun Nuclear Plant in Nebraska.

fort-calhoun-power-plant.jpg


We also get hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms, earthquakes, etc. in various parts of the U.S. Japan gets earthquakes and tsunami's.

If anything this underscores the need to diversify. Don't put two of your largest plants in the same area. Also make sure that you have alternate source suppliers in different parts of the world for each component you need in manufacturing, or you may find your plant shut down because you can't find the parts you need.
 
@RealBeast, Putz:
Hahahaowow.png, New Orleans' lookin' at you.

It's useless to cry over the spoiled milk that is the lack of American manufacturing in the computer peripheral market. If you ever actually look at the profit margin of assembly, you'd think twice about MADE IN USA for anything computer related.

Citing the paper released by University of California Irvine in 2011 and Taiwanese analysis done on it, Foxconn makes about 3-4 dollars on an iPhone 4S (0.5% on the MSRP) and that's a company with a million employees. Roughly 7 dollars goes to the manual labor and that pie is cut between all the subcontractors in just PRC alone, leaving Foxconn with a smaller cut than this $7 USD per iPhone for the workers.

Let me ask you this: IS 0.5% XBOX HUEG PROFIT MARGIN? It's pretty obvious that not even blue-collar will bother investing for such a meager gain. Those with money would rather play with leveraging, derivatives, or even the currency market, rather than going wasting their time earning peanuts.
 
Price rising is one thing, but I wonder how long it will take for it to drop to where it was before the flooding.

I really hope it would start dropping as soon as they ramp up the production again.
 
I generally only use WD drives. And now ASI won't even ship them to me, unless it's for full OEM packages, rather than just single sale, which is more common for me. I knew I should have stocked up while they were cheap. Now I'm stuck with buying them from NE sans my distro discount. :(

Whew, I thought I was the only one who was getting the big green weenie from ASI over drives LOL. Most of the distributors I use are limiting me to a quantity of ONE of a model of drive per day. Fuckin' ridiculous, I usually order 2-5 of a certain model # each day or every other day. Not a big fan of rationing like this LOL. :mad:
 
I've seen very little mention in all these articles about SSD's and if they are going to be impacted production/price-wise. Anyone got a link to any articles that have mention of if SSD's will be affected?
 
Zarathustra[H];1037923332 said:
Sure, if you want to pay $800 for a 2TB drive, why not make it in the U.S. or Europe. :p

.

You drank the Koolaid, huh ? If you think it takes an hour to asssemble a hard drive, you need your head examined ! Even at an hour, it would add $25 to the cost of a drive, minus the cost of shipping from Thailand.
 
@ir0nw0olf: sporadic reports from China and Taiwanese firms such as Kinpo are saying that there will be some slight impact. Price have increased due to speculation so far. Kinpo in particular has stated that they see only 1% of their asset affected by the flood.
 
I hope your pissed at the companies that are jacking up the price on old stock and letting them know that.

Really? Supply and demand. Of course you do not have to like it. But it is hardly immoral to react in such a way in response to an impending supply shortage. Why do people so often (wrongly) argue that businesses should do the "right" (read stupid, generous, and nice) thing and sell the product at the same price as it was before, even though its assumptions that it used to price its product have now changed?

So... be pissed at the companies for "jacking up the price." Because that makes a lot of sense... :rolleyes:
 
Sadly it would still be cheaper for their entire factory to explode and have 100,000 dead workers and have to rebuild from scratch than it is for them to have a production plant in the US.



1TB blacks went from $69 to $119 over the weekend.

You beat me to the punch and made me laugh in doing so! Thanks! :p
 
You drank the Koolaid, huh ? If you think it takes an hour to asssemble a hard drive, you need your head examined ! Even at an hour, it would add $25 to the cost of a drive, minus the cost of shipping from Thailand.

We are not just talking the final assembly.

We are talking the cost of real estate (much lower over there) the cost of the guy who maintains and sets up the machines, the cost of the manufacturing engineers who trouble shoot when there are issues, probably lower tax rates, etc. etc. Just like at the supermarket, it's amazing how quickly things can add up. $800 was an exaggeration, but for the sake of argument lets say its $20 per drive. You've seen these forums right? people bicker about a $20 cost difference all the time, and that's before you consider OEM's who buy millions of units. To them a $20 cost difference is tens of millions of dollars.

The problem is that its a race to the bottom. You could have a company that doesn't really WANT to go offshore, but as soon as one of their competitors do, their hand is forced, because they will have to lower their prices in order to be competitive, and when they do, it gobbles up their entire profit margin.

There is no koolaid.

Businesses are not a bunch of morons. They would never move their entire operations across the globe to where its annoying and costly for them to get to, and communicate with, let alone transport product to and from, unless they ran all their numbers and saw a huge benefit in doing so.
 
Samsung 2TB F4 drives went from as low as $69 to $120 now.
I was thinking about getting another one till I read this thread and checked the prices.
 
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