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."
Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, sheesh. It's not like "single point of failure" is an unknown concept or anything.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What do they expect? (Score:2, Insightful)
they gambled.
we all lost.
isn't a totally free market GREAT??
no one watches out or cares. its just a blind grab for short term revenues. no one thinks long term. no one does, anymore.
its surprising this hasn't happened *more*.
silly humans. we can't plan for shit, as a species.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, everything would be great if people weren't people, but they are, so it's important to learn to work with it.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
isn't a totally free market GREAT??
When you consider that it resulted in a price drop for 2TB HDDs from $250 or so in 2010 to $75 as of 3 months ago, yes, it is great.
The "spike in prices" is only a spike because of how cheap everything had gotten, and it only got so cheap because of heavy competition. Second guessing things and claiming it would have been better with heavier regulation and restricted ability to outsource is moronic.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not comparing the severity of the situation. It is comparing the feedback reaction making that makes the situation worse.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you CAN plan for this. By, you know, not putting 75% of the entire world's manufacturing of hard drive motors into a single location.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
unimportant things
Right. Now if only someone could define what that means...
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully this will become a case study for how diversification of supply chain can be immensely profitable - if any one of those companies had split their factories 50/50 with another location, they could basically print money for the next 12 months by undercutting the entire rest of the market by 50% (which would still be above what prices were before the flooding)
It's amazing how companies don't learn - Toyota & Honda did the exact same thing by having a diverse set of models instead of focusing only on gas-guzzling SUV's, and all of a sudden when gas prices skyrocketed they made a fortune.
Re:No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. Even with the current rise in hard drive prices, SSDs are still terribly expensive by comparison. Otherwise, SSDs would have already been seen as competitive against hard drives even before this supply problem.
Only 2x or 3x for a lot better performance? Not everyone would have jumped on it but there still would have been plenty of performance minded consumers lining up to buy them.
Even with limited supply, it still makes much more sense to escalate to larger drive sizes before going to SSD.
Terribly expensive if you look at price per GB, but not terribly expensive if you're just interested in getting a nice, high performance, low power, quiet drive, and don't need a ton of disk space, then SSD's are quite reasonable.
Newegg sells a 120GB SSD for about the same price as a 1TB hard disk drive. Most people (well, maybe not the Slashdot crowd) don't need a TB of disk space and the SSD will work quite nicely for them.
When I upgraded from a 1TB drive to a 64GB SSD in my desktop, I kept the 1TB drive for my large storage needs. It turns out that except for a single DVD that I ripped a few months ago, I haven't stored anything on the 1TB drive, and still have lots of room on the 64GB drive. My 8GB of photos and 12GB of music still leave me lots of room to grow. I imaging that by the time I do outgrow the 64GB drive, I'll be able to buy a 256GB or even 512GB SSD for the same or less price than I paid for the 64GB drive.
I think the problem that computer manufacturers face is that when a consumer sees a computer with a 500GB hard drive next to one with a 120GB SSD, they are going to go for the 500GB hard drive since bigger numbers are better.
Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Insightful)
They are neither over priced or overrated. Just misunderstood.
Gen 1 was shit, much like the first automobiles. Just a curiosity for the early adopters and extremophiles. The latest ones are not really over priced. That's just what it costs, which reflects what the market will bear. Sure, there might be price fixing, but for what it *is*, it seems reasonable depending on the model and features.
It is most certainly not overrated. The performance increase is quite substantial over spinning media. Form factor and density are pretty darn good too. Let's not forget that with no moving parts you don't have to worry about letting it fall. Of course, spinning media has some features to mitigate that, but SSD mitigates it by fundamental design.
My own laptop has a small 64GB SSD and two 1TB "normal" drives. The responsiveness of the OS *skyrocketed*. You don't need huge SSDs. The smallest SSD on market would probably suffice.
This is where they are misunderstood. With proper configuration you can move all user data to the larger cheaper drives and use the SSD for core files and temporary storage/cache. Even with Windows 7 bloated to all hell I still have a lot of programs installed (faster to have their files on the SSD too) with almost 1/3rd of the drive free. It's nice to not have to defrag either. With TRIM support the reliability and lifetime of the drive goes up quite a bit too.
Where they are not overrated at all is server applications. You can build a very very fast DB server with some SSD's. So there are valid enterprise use cases for SSDs when you compare their costs against vastly more expensive solutions delivering higher I/O and throughput such as the ioDrive2. There are quite a few drawbacks to a PCI-E implementation of SSD that can balance against the resultant bottleneck of the SATA bus. However, with 6 GB/s SATA that is less of a concern and there are some pretty decent SATA RAID controllers that can better handle the load. For a number of database applications you don't need a large amount of space, but higher performance. Build a RAID with cheaper and more affordable 64GB SSDs with a decent controller ($1500-200$) and you have a storage solution at about 25% of the cost of the enterprise PCI-E SSD solutions.
Like I said, very misunderstood.
The vast majority of people would see a tangible and cost justified benefit simply be using it for the core OS files. I know I am.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we didn't. We all won. Even with the price increases, hard disks are available and the price per terabyte is ridiculously cheap. The only people who think they lost, are the whiney bitches who are comparing the prices to what they were a couple months ago. Try comparing the cost to what it was two years ago, and terabytes are slightly cheaper except they also use fewer SATA ports.
What we're seeing isn't expensiveness; it's volatility. If you can't handle that the prices sometimes vary between "dirt cheap" and "cheaper than dirt," then boo-fucking-hoo. DO NOT make me start sentences with "I remember when," you spoiled little whipper-snapper.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
And, uh, where do you think that technological progress came from? You think the Glorious People's Hard Drive Committee would have delivered $250 3TB hard drives to the world?
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