Thailand Floods to Lead to Hard Drive Shortages for Months

Yeah, I held off at $69 on the Spinpoint F4's hoping for the prices to go on sale for $60 again.

I hope I don't have any drives die for the next 2-3 years.
 
I missed this news posting but it's explains the strange prices I saw in my Amazon cart.

Last night I added two books to my Amazon cart, have many items I keep in "saved for later" but never really buy them. One item was the WD Raptor drive, normally $169, suddenly it jumped to $300. Eh? Figured some 3rd party seller was trying to move the market.

Now I took a look again and found the 2TB black drives are selling for over $200 now, last month I bought one for $139, and that was a higher than normal pricing.
 
Reimu said:
@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.
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+1

The price hikes are pure speculation at this time. They are assuming a worse case production delay.
If you can, then just wait, the prices will eventually come back down.
 
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AssMan said:
Anyone have this drive? I've seen a few customer reviews that had DOA drives or drives that failed pretty fast.
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That's a common complaint with drives accross the board when it comes to drives, especially from Newegg for some reason.

Bulk multipack drives seem to have less of an issue, but individual drives have high DOA and early failure rates.

Some suggest this is because Newegg uses UPS, and recommend going to Amazon's FedEX services instead.
 
AssMan said:
Amazon still has a 1.5TB green drive for $65 shipped. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barra...mllink-20&prod_electronics_Seagate-B004CVJID8

I'm thinking of buying one or two while they're still that price. Newegg had the same drive for $68 shipped a day or so ago now it's about $87 with shipping.

Anyone have this drive? I've seen a few customer reviews that had DOA drives or drives that failed pretty fast.
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Whoa, sweet deal if you want to snag and resell :D I am sure since all the prices went up you could easily flip this for some really easy profits :)

Or, I mighttttt just snag one. I need something to compliment my (small spaced) SSD drive :cool:
 
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Simple answer.

The prices get jacked up - I don't buy unless of a failure.

I can wait for the prices to drop again.;)
 
AssMan said:
Amazon still has a 1.5TB green drive for $65 shipped. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barra...0DL003/dp/B004CVJID8/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

I'm thinking of buying one or two while they're still that price. Newegg had the same drive for $68 shipped a day or so ago now it's about $87 with shipping.

Anyone have this drive? I've seen a few customer reviews that had DOA drives or drives that failed pretty fast.
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It's a Seagate, might aswell pick one out of the water when it drifts over from the factories. It'll work just as good.
 
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NickJames said:
It's a Seagate, might aswell pick one out of the water when it drifts over from the factories. It'll work just as good.
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Hehe I managed to get two for $60 each. I've got a 1.5TB Seagate that I've had over a year now with no problems but even then I remember people having lots of issues with them. Since the prices look like they're gonna be up for a while and the reviews overall are good I figured I'd give it a shot.
 
AssMan said:
Hehe I managed to get two for $60 each. I've got a 1.5TB Seagate that I've had over a year now with no problems but even then I remember people having lots of issues with them. Since the prices look like they're gonna be up for a while and the reviews overall are good I figured I'd give it a shot.
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Just raid 5 them with some redundancy (or better yet, use FlexRAID) that way if one fails, you just replace it without dataloss!
 
Zarathustra[H];1037935579 said:
Just raid 5 them with some redundancy (or better yet, use FlexRAID) that way if one fails, you just replace it without dataloss!
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I'm tempted. I've got one 1.5TB Seagate all ready and two more ordered. I just decided to order a third from Amazon but they're out of stock so I can't be sure I'll get it and I don't want to Raid 5 the two that are coming from the same place.

I also don't have raid support on my board but I might upgrade my comp..... I'll figure something out anyway if I do decide to.

Right now I'm debating on if I should try and order more while they're out of stock but $65.

I've read the stuff in the thread but I don't have much time to think about this.

How do you guys think the prices will be in the next couple of months? I don't want to have a drive fail and spend a ton more on a replacement because I didn't order more and I do build computers for friends from time to time so I could easily use them if it's gonna be next year before the prices are back down.
 
Zarathustra[H];1037924380 said:
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.
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Knowing something about Thailand most of what you are saying is is very questionable. Land is pretty cheap in the USA, in fact I remember reading an article when I was in Thailand stating that alot of people were finding it cheaper to live in Florida than Thailand. Also taxes are generally pretty crazy on foreign firms. The only saving grace is high corruption. Finally they spend plenty of money shipping competent engineers from the USA over there and paying them very high wages to keep things running while they are far away from home. Most of these factories are in Bangkok where real estate is not cheap at all. In the USA you could plop these things anywhere you dont have to be in a big expensive city. But in Asia most of the time the infrastructure outside a city make it not worth it to build elsewhere.

It all comes down the cheap labor in the end and very relaxed if any environmental control. I would say flexibility in the workforce is also very helpful. Good luck getting rid of a lazy union employee in the USA. The other major advantage is now days almost every electronic component is produced in Asia so there is almost no supplies close by here in the USA. Eventually though we wont be sending engineers over there in fact we wont have any companies making much of anything because we sold out all our infrastructure and expertise for cheap labor and the option to dump the waste into the Chao Phraya river.
 
I saw some Hitachi 2TB drives on Amazon last night going for $300. This isn't going to be pretty.
 
robscomputer said:
I missed this news posting but it's explains the strange prices I saw in my Amazon cart.

Last night I added two books to my Amazon cart, have many items I keep in "saved for later" but never really buy them. One item was the WD Raptor drive, normally $169, suddenly it jumped to $300. Eh? Figured some 3rd party seller was trying to move the market.

Now I took a look again and found the 2TB black drives are selling for over $200 now, last month I bought one for $139, and that was a higher than normal pricing.
Click to expand...

Sounds like pricing saved you from buying a raptor drive.

NickJames said:
It's a Seagate, might aswell pick one out of the water when it drifts over from the factories. It'll work just as good.
Click to expand...

I had a good laugh from this.
 
Probably why all hard drives on NewEgg are limit 1 per customer. So frustrating for company orders.
 
I am so glad I got my 2TB F4 2 weeks ago. $140 now which is a hair over twice what I paid for my HDD.

And for all of you hoping prices go back to normal after Taiwan gets this all sorted out, people thought the same about DDR2 prices but they never did go back down.
 
What bothers me is the close proximity to Black Friday. I think this may also affect SSDs I do not think it will be nearly as much but enough that maybe we wont see as killer deals as I had hoped.
 
compudocs said:
I am so glad I got my 2TB F4 2 weeks ago. $140 now which is a hair over twice what I paid for my HDD.

And for all of you hoping prices go back to normal after Taiwan gets this all sorted out, people thought the same about DDR2 prices but they never did go back down.
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Well, to be fair, DDR2 also was winding down its production as DDR3 was supplanting it. Not sure platter based mass storage is going out the window quite yet.
 
Tiporaro said:
Well, to be fair, DDR2 also was winding down its production as DDR3 was supplanting it. Not sure platter based mass storage is going out the window quite yet.
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That and DDR3 has gotten pretty cheap recently in place of DDR2. I've bought a lot of DDR3 I don't even need yet figuring it'll go up in price at some point and I'll need some.... even if that's after is not mainstream anymore.

I'm just hoping this doesn't last to long.
 
If they were smart they would use cheap Eskimo labor and have them built in Nanuvik
 
I still have ~1.5 TB free on my media center. Hopefully that lasts until prices come down. About a month ago I was thinking of adding another 2 TB but held off on it hoping for a price under $69. Oh well.
 
Well, it looks like I will have a lot more money to upgrade my gaming build if I continue to rely on the 1x500GB (Primary) and 2x1TB (Gaming drives) Caviar Blacks I have while waiting for the price to come down. They are only a couple of years old anyway. Looks like I will just have to be patient as I'm still up in the air on how useful a SSD would be in a gaming system.

Ah, bad to the drawing board. Was going to wait till Black Friday anyway to see what my change.
 
Well this is just dandy, looks like that laptop 9.5mm 1TB drive I wanted to get jumped to $220 from $169. Used to see it for $130.

I wonder how well Samsung's HDDs are? I only owned one about a decade ago that didn't fail on me.
 
image012-verge-560.jpg


Well there's your problem!
 
Yeah. At work we cant sell harddrives except to good customers and in systems. And the prices Doubled. Its rediculous. Buy your harddrives now, there only going to go up.
 
Just because Western Digital is having production facilty problems doesn't make it right for the other Hard Drive Manufacturers to be price gouging their Drives !

Also, if a Company is situated in an area that is prone to flooding ...wouldn't it be logical to put your production/maufacturing on (at least) the 2nd floor. Epic Fail stupidity !

Screw'em all ...I have approx. 25 new Hard Drives of varying sizes/manufacturers & can wait easily for this crap to wind down.
 
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