PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives 353
Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it is not like a bank run. (Score:5, Informative)
When bank runs occur, there is a systemic lack of funds to meet demand due to fractional reserve lending.
This is simply not enough supply to meet demand, and not similar to failure of fractional reserve lending at all.
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Informative)
I might be wrong, but I feel, really feel like the flooding wasn't that big factor
but rather its great excuse to jack up the prices.
I remember similar story about RAM and Taiwan earthquake, when it was found out that damages to facilities were really minimal.
Wish it was a scam... but I cannot help but feel sorry for their loss. Please check out these pics, showing the damage done, I haven't been able to find any newer pics, but the damage is beyond bad.
To address your concerns on this hdd scam, I present pics of from a Western Digital production plant:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/11/1/photo-horrific-images-of-flooded-western-digital-factory.aspx [brightsideofnews.com]
I couldn't bring myself to look for pictures/video from the surrounding area, but my heart does go out to them.
And in other news (Score:5, Informative)
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/12/02/western-digital-lifts-dec-qtr-view-restarts-thai-mfg-shrs-up/ [forbes.com]
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Informative)
You've obviously not used a machine with the OS and apps on a SSD.
I will not be getting another computer without a SSD.
Sure, for bulk data, such as music, movies and photos, these all live on spinning disks, but for things where latency and throughput matters, SSDs are more than worth the additional cost.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
You'd be crazy (or just too rich to care I suppose) if you wanted your media collection to live on SSD, but even for that hybrid disks are pretty good in a lot of usage scenarios.
You'll also get little to no benefit putting SSDs on a RAID controller - most RAID controllers are optimised for the access times and throughput of regular hard disks, even if in this case regular means a 15k RPM SAS disk.
Post-flood hard drives (Score:5, Informative)
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
I'd definitely be a little careful about the first few batches of new drives that come off those assembly lines, considering all the decontamination, repair and re-calibration the flooded manufacturing equipment would have needed. Would be interesting to know if there's going to be a bump in their drive rate failure over the next few years for Western Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba.
Re:Consumption tax on whose backs? (Score:3, Informative)
You are missing the fact that the well-to-do's spending on their toys far outstrips what they've been paying in income taxes, and especially since they are so masterful at hiding their income from the taxes. You also have to study the Fair Tax to know that no poor person pays a penny of Fair Tax. Also good to know is the fact the the income taxes are highly regressive, starting with 15.3% of the 1st dollar that the poor person makes, in the form of the payroll taxes (social security and medicare) and are further compounded by the hidden income tax in the price of all American-manufactured goods, which amounts to, on average, about 22% of the selling price of those goods. Add everything together, and the poor are being crushed by up to 37% taxes on their income right now. The Fair Tax would reduce that to zero via the mechanism of a prebate, which is essentially the gov't giving every social-security-number-carrying American enough money each month to pay the Fair Tax on income up to the poverty level. So, if you are making the poverty level, you pay no tax. If you are making less than the poverty level, you get a bit of a subsidy. If you are making millions, you're going to be sending millions to Washington when you buy your next $70 million dollar yacht.
As for the middle class taxes rising, my own taxes would fall about $2K, and at somewhat less than $100K income, I'm square in the middle of the middle class. The testimony of 2 Fair Tax experts before the house ways and means committee earlier this year stated the fact of the rich's spending outstripping the middle class's tax burden. It;s here:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676 [house.gov]
And if you go down to the bottom of that page, you can call up the video of the whole testimony and get those statements in real-time, on video. Unfortunately, I think that comes at about 1 hr and 36 minutes into the testimony, if I remember right.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:4, Informative)
You're confusing "influence of free market" with "influence of technological progress". Former had little to nothing to do with prices of medium going down as technological progress made better technologies and processes available for use.
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Informative)
I might be wrong
You are wrong:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_11_1/PHOTO-Horrific-Images-of-Flooded-Western-Digital-Factory/WD_FloodB_689.jpg [brightsideofnews.com]
http://www.innovationpov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HDD-Production-Equip.jpg [innovationpov.com]
Re:No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:4, Informative)
*there is a 120GB IDE drive for £33 but afaict most modern motherboards don't have IDE.
So, if your motherboard does not have IDE, it is still cheaper to buy an IDE drive and a IDE-SATA adapter.
Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Informative)
Better reliability is a somewhat dubious claim.[...]
Until stories of people chugging along on 5 or 7 year old SSDs are commonplace, the technology simply won't have the track record to justify such claims.
I have no idea why people insist on their drives being so damn reliable. Shit breaks. You need to have a backup plan. You can get free, reliable disk-imaging software that mirrors your drive(s) for all three major desktop OSs.
I run all my personal laptops on SSDs with a weekly imaging (my OSX laptop has time machine that runs nightly). If my drive fails, I just boot from external for immediate issues, and I can replace the drive in a day or two if while I RMA or buy a replacement.
The key here is to have a process that emphasizes backups. I've gotten all my relatives on the religion too... nowadays there's no excuse other than you wanted to save $100 or so to not buy a 2nd external HDD.
It's not just hard drives (Score:2, Informative)
My company makes electric wires (some of the stuff we make go into hard drive motors) and we were hit badly by the flood. We were lucky that we aren't located inside an industrial park so we started going into the factory to recover our machinery on the week that we got flooded, even though the water was chest high. The industrial parks were closed for months before anyone are allowed back in.
It's been 50 days since we were flooded and the entire compound is now dry, but since every piece of machinery is damaged (roughly US$10 million loss) it may take up to three months before we can start production and six months or more before we can go back to the original production capacity.
We were interviewed by Taiwanese TV here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z62rHpW3mgg