Hard Drive Shortage Relief Coming In Q1 2012 205
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."
Market pressures. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's great that HDD production is about to increase again, but I think the recent "crunch" was also a good thing in a way. Perhaps it encouraged some end users to get more creative with data storage techniques, resulting in more efficient systems that can do more with less bulk storage capacity. At least I can hope so.
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most end users never noticed. People that needed the storage paid the higher price. People that didn't actually need it just held off until prices went down.
Re: (Score:2)
I waited until prices went back to late 2012 levels before I bought my new drive today. Now I can get my camcorder out and not worry about losing frames (MiniDV captured on DV mode).
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh sweet, let me know what late 2012 levels are(will be?), I'm looking to upgrade then and do not want to be ripped off!
Re: (Score:2)
2TB for 79.99 bucks.
it's not rocket science.(2TB being 139.9 euros off the shelf around here right now and we got a bit higher taxing).
Re: (Score:2)
And you know for sure what prices will be six to nine months from now?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I believe that the truth about http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/25/0410256/a-small-glimmer-of-hope-for-faster-than-light-neutrinos [slashdot.org] is now known.
Re: (Score:2)
âo you have an advanced camcorder that senses how much free space is on a target drive and drops frames to fit the video onto it?
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Market pressures. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Informative)
We make systems that have up to 200+TB storage and had to do emergency qualifications of replacement disk drives because the drive vendors told us "sorry, can't deliver." That must be because we have long term purchasing agreements, i.e. prenegotiated prices. I think the bastards rather sold at 3x prices to Newegg & co.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Market pressures. (Score:4)
I'm trying to hold off, but damn if drives aren't dying left and right around me right now.
Week before Christmas 2011, the main disk in my Windows Home Server died. Had to buy a replacement (but managed to Ghost it and reset the registry so it recognizes the new drive).
Now my NAS appliance died, looks like I have to go buy a new one.
Damn unlucky, it looks like.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Efficient? With drive prices where they were it is not efficient to spend a lot of time minimizing drive space usage.
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, according to the article, "Due to increased costs of components and materials, HDD prices are likely to rise 30-40% from the level before the floods by the end of 2012, the sources indicated."
A 30-40% increase is A LOT, esp. given the present and foreseeable economic conditions.
Anyway, how is one supposed to be "efficient" with regards to JPG, MP3, and other highly-compressed file formats?
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, how is one supposed to be "efficient" with regards to JPG, MP3, and other highly-compressed file formats?
You can recover up to 50% of your drive space by switching your collection over to midget-pr0n.
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Funny)
"Let the joyous news be spread." --Munchkin Mayor
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Interesting)
Start burning stuff to DVD or putting it on cheap flash drives and hand them out to your friends. It's just like saving stuff to the Cloud, except they appreciate the music and movies and you can drink with them.
I call it "Sneaker-cloud".
I am learning more and more that the answer to life's questions often comes down to the people who are around you, physically. Family, friends, neighbors. Internet is good for lots of things, but I'm re-discovering all the value hidden in these non-virtual relationships. Salut!
Re:Market pressures. (Score:4, Funny)
Start burning stuff to DVD or putting it on cheap flash drives and hand them out to your friends. It's just like saving stuff to the Cloud, except they appreciate the music and movies and you can drink with them.
I call it "Sneaker-cloud".
So I take it you use Air Jordans for the physical layer? (or is that considered the data-link layer)?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Latency might be high, but you can't beat the bandwidth. :)
Re: (Score:2)
ka-CHING!
Re:Market pressures. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it had more of an impact on SSD adoption.
Before the floods, SSD prices were 10x higher than hard drives, per gigabyte. When the floods hit, hard drive prices nearly doubled, while SSD prices continued to slowly drop. That added up to SSDs being only 4-6x the per-gigabyte price of a hard drive, at least temporarily.
I've certainly noticed a lot more people buying and using SSDs. I'll probably do so myself at some point, once I have a computer that's primarily disc-latency-bound instead of CPU- or GPU-bound in most tasks.
Re: (Score:2)
And you'd still need it as a "drive" because operating systems etc treats drives differently. Drives aren't normally wiped on reboots, bluescreens, application crashes.
Re:Market pressures. (Score:5, Interesting)
Triple the performance is pretty good for cache. I see that too, particularly with the newer SAS RAID controllers with 1GB of flash-backed write cache. A decent modern SATA attached SSD can do something like 70x the IOPs and 20x the bandwidth of a spinning disk though, and also sees additional benefits from RAM caching. The PCIe attached versions can do well over 1000x the IOPs of 15K 6G SAS. No joke, one PCIe attached internal flash drive [fusionio.com] can outperform on I/O even the most optimally configured array with the 1000 of the fastest available spinning disks (which typically would take at least 3 full racks and 25 KW and have a drive failure every week). And the latency is down near 26 microseconds in the worst case, where a cache miss is best-case 2000 microseconds of latency on a spinning disk.
Solid state: it's just faster. It also costs a bit more, but not offensively so. RAM is getting a lot cheaper these days (about $8/GB for the registered 8GB DIMM) so if you've got a problem set that fits in configurable memory and doesn't require the reliability of static storage during the problem set, RAMDISK is definitely an option again for some. Frankly these RAM prices look crazy cheap to those of us who were praying for the day that RAM dropped below $100/megabyte back in the day. I've paid over $300,000/GB for RAM ($300/MB) - and it was much slower RAM too. Going over the math in my head, apparently I once also paid $2,500,000/TB for HDD storage ($300 for 0.00002 TB) - out of my own pocket as a consumer. That's just crazy.
The question comes down to what is your time worth? What can you do with storage this fast? Does your data fit on the SSDs? Are there other benefits? Everybody has different needs. The available technology is outpacing our needs by a good bit these days. You now can fit all of Peak Twitter into the storage, network and processing capacity of one off-the-rack server - though of course you would use three and geographically isolate them for HA if you were Twitter. These new technologies enable us to do things we couldn't do before - or alternately they allow us to use software that's so offensively bloated it robs us of all the benefit of technology's advance.
Subbing an SSD for your laptop or desktop's boot HDD will get boot times down to mere seconds even in Windows. Anyway, I'm rambling. Time to click "submit".
Re: (Score:3)
Don't start. This is /. Next a greybeard will post about stringing core onto wires by hand. (We used to dream of stringing core...we used relay storage. We used to dream of relay storage, we stored data by writing it onto a loop of magnetic wire, if you wanted it back you had to wait for it to loop around, the thing was it was a party line and you never knew how long the loop was today...and we liked it.)
Unable to overcome to compulsion.
6.25 M$/Gbyte ($100/16K)
Drive price is similar, ST-225? POS step
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
First, understand that my "workload" is primarily gaming. That means relatively GPU-heavy loads, compared to what you might expect.
Second, understand that my primary gaming computer died recently, so I'm currently on a machine that is... not designed for gaming. Dual Xeons (dual-core each), 5GB of (fully-buffered, ECC) RAM, yes, very good for a server or such, and absolute overkill for any game I've found. I have no complaints on that end - even Minecraft, a game legendary amongst gamers for choking up most
Hey, now... (Score:5, Funny)
It's not all their fault, really. MSPaint doesn't have JPEG support in Windows 98.
Re: (Score:3)
hm... I dunno, with digital images coming in at over 3MB on an entry level camera these days, and SD cards at stupid prices which mean you can cram nearly 3,000 full resolution images per 16GB card (so deleting images is an exercise in timewasting more than saving limited space!), plus HD video at 8GB/30min, I don't think it's be that hard filling 300GB of /scratch space/.
Price relief to come some time later. (Score:4, Insightful)
Granted, the drop in supply was more abrupt than the restoration of supply, so one would expect prices to follow the same curve.
It may be too much to hope that this leads to more geographic diversity in manufacturing, but I hope it's at least produced some lasting acceleration toward solid-state storage.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
more instances of total data loss with SSDs
There's a reason that Intel costs a little more...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Hell, for my MacBook Pro, I have my entire OS X setup and applications on an SSD. - Data is on a 1 TB hard drive stuffed in the DVD slot. I also back up the SSD to the HD so if the SSD goes tits up, I hold down an extra key and boot into the slower hard drive.
An SSD can make even a sluggish 3 - 4 year old laptop feel like it's a spring chicken. Better than Geritol. I just wish I had access to a similar upgrade.
Re: (Score:2)
"If and when an SSD fails, the failure is likely to be catastrophic with total data loss.
I don't have any practical experience, but shouldn't SSDs just become read-only when they fail? Or is the failure not due to wear-out of the flash cells, maybe.
On my OS disk, a third of the data turned to goo 360 days after the drive was installed. I was able to copy the important data off, which was useful because there were a few handy scripts and stuff not on the backup list at that time. The fascinating thing was that it was only the blocks of disk which contained data that had failed - there was a largeish chunk of unused disk which was absolutely fine. In any case, I went back to a spinning disk for now.
Good News... (Score:3)
...but, what's keeping 4TB internal drives off the market?
The 4TB Deskstar has been out for a while...where are Seagate and WD?
Re:Good News... (Score:5, Informative)
Long story short, it's a 5 platter [vr-zone.com] design and generally they've not been good in the past, too many parts to be reliable. The other manufacturers are probably waiting until they can ship a 4x1TB disk instead of 5x800GB. Hitachi is actually shipping 1x1TB disks in the 4K7000.D and 4K5000.B class, but I guess the yield of perfect platters is too low yet.
First quarter of 2012? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhhh... unless they're using some new calendar I'm unfamiliar with, the first quarter is about two-thirds over. The fact that they're using the future tense for something which is already mostly gone makes me wonder just how well informed this article is.
Re:First quarter of 2012? (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article (not recommended) you'll see that the authors don't have the best grasp on the English language. My guess is that they meant "will have increased", as in, by the time time we finish adding up our production this quarter, it should be around 145 Mu. Considering the writers are based in Taiwan, they can hardly be blamed for not having a complete grasp of the future perfect tense.
Re: (Score:3)
If you read the article (highly recommended) you'll see that the authors have invented a FREAKIN' TIME MACHINE!!
FTFY
Drive reliability (Score:3, Interesting)
Has there been any data published about the reliability of the drives coming off of the assembly line now? When the drive makers reduced their warranties, there was concern that production after the flooding would have a drop in quality. Has this been borne out, or was it unfounded speculation?
That's all great, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The floods caused, what, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure damage? Who's ultimately going to write the final checks that pay for all the repairs (and likely upgrades)? Don't we know who? It will be every person and company that buys those products and the population of Thailand. Ultimately the entire global economy pays the bulk of the cost. The One Percenters who control those factories damned sure aren't gonna foot much of the bill. So... don't be a fool and expect prices to return to where they would have been otherwise. That will take a decade.
(It's exactly how recessions work: One Percenters feel a pinch in their ability to concentrate wealth, and in a perverse reversal of the Trickle Down theory they make all those they employ suffer instead so that they regain the full extent of that ability. The only difference in this case is that the proximal cause is an obvious natural disaster. Economists have been feeding us lies about such things for decades.)
Re:That's all great, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, what exactly are you raging about? Just about every pricing theory from monopoly pricing to perfect competition require that costs be passed to you. If raw material costs go up, the costs are passed to you. If labor costs go up, the costs are passed to you. If people shoplift, the costs are passed to you. If the government adds a new tax, the costs are passed to you. If natural disasters cause damage, the cost is passed to you. Every business operates on margins, that more money comes in through revenue than what leaves through cost. That goes for everyone from the 1%ers to the corner shop.
Do you expect it to be like in good years they'll take a profit, and in bad years they'll put the money back? Seriously? I wonder how you'd like it if your salary or your bank account worked like that. No, if I owned Newegg I'd expect it to turn a profit whether disks costs $50 or $300, my job is to beat all the other stores trying to make a business, not fight the market forces. In the long run I expect it to be the same for factories, if risk of flooding is a cost of doing business we must account for that and make sure our prices reflect all the costs, it's the ones that don't that are foolish. In short, I find your idea that 1%ers should "foot the bill" rather absurd.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What exactly are you raging about? I was responding to the post and title's implication that everything will soon be 'back to normal' as if nothing had happened.
I find your idea that 1%ers should "foot the bill" rather absurd.
Quote, please, the exact portion of my comments where I made that statement? You can't. I never said it. What I clearly implied was that One Percenters don't foot their fair share of the bill.
Re: (Score:2)
They don't have a "fair share" as they aren't running a charity. All costs need to be covered by the product and nothing else.
It's perfectly acceptable that the consumer pays for the rebuild, just as it is that they get to pay for the R&D in a new product, or the repayment of the initial investment to build the factory.
Re: (Score:2)
That's very descriptive of an economic jungle. Jungles have no ethic.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, I don't expect that. I didn't write I expect that. I wrote that I expect the One Percenters should suffer the loss in proportion to everyone else. Which they won't, of course.
Re: (Score:2)
Explain precisely how, then, in a fashion that isn't utter hogwash like your first comment here.
Re:That's all great, but.... (Score:4, Funny)
BTW, are you going to make the baby-puppy-kitten roast next weekend?
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, it's true. They ride on others' coattails.
Re: (Score:2)
Those would still be One Percenters profiting at the expense of others, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Unless you want to actually look at the evidence. Go read something like "A Monetary History of the United States." You will get a taste of what real evidence is like, and when you disagree with the conclusions, you have a way to back it up. It's lot different than the trash propaganda someone has been feeding you so far.
You should also read this [lhup.edu]. You've fallen
Re: (Score:2)
Well, now we know who authored your gospel. You seem to lack the perspective to recognize that it's just as likely that you are the crazy cargo cultist as it is that I am. That lack of perspective is that way of things with dogmatism and effective self-delusion. Your prison cell is your own mind, regardless how you wallpaper it.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd like to add that I can't quote any important cult-status figure like Milton Friedman as the source of my conclusions, because the conclusions are ENTIRELY my own. I've been observing and analyzing the economy MYSELF, and drawing MY OWN conclusions, not simply reading some other alleged genius' contrivances and then thinking to myself, "Yeah, it's like that!" That's what you've done. How do I know? Because you quoted him as the source of your own beliefs. Your inability to even recognize it is what
Re: (Score:2)
I find it curious that in your mind you associate the conclusions I shared with conspiracy theories, particularly because those theories are adopted by people from some other person, not reasoned out for themselves. That is precisely what I haven't done. You think reading a book by Milton Friedman is an objective source of information, "good data"? How quaint. I rejected what you handed me because it's not even data. Reading economic papers isn't data either: that is the interpretation of alleged data
Spoiled and Then Some (Score:2)
But this will be like gas prices right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Skyrocket the moment they think supply is threatened and then fall back down glacially while waiting for the next disaster or crises. Supply may increase as production ramps up but I'm betting that the middle men and manufacturers will keep prices high for as long as they can. Some manufacturers apparently didn't suffer the same losses but jacked prices up too so this should be no surprise at all...
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:5, Informative)
...how does a production shortfall of less than 50% result in a price hike of *over 300%*??
This curve should explain it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I wish I had mod points. I was practically screaming at my monitor about parent being modded +4 insightful. I'm holding back on making a political statement regarding economics at this point.
Re: (Score:2)
I had never seen this (for want of a better description) "fallacy of unit elasticity" until someone brought it up here back when this HDD crisis started.
Now it seems every story has some clown repeating it, and other clowns modding them up.
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:5, Informative)
Pretend that 100 people want to buy one HDD each. If there are only 50 identical HDDs, that doesn't mean that the price goes up 50% (or 100%). It means that only 50 people can buy HDDs. The other 50 have to go without.
Sort everyone by how much they're willing to pay for a HDD, from lowest to highest. Then the highest price that the 51th person is willing to pay for a HDD is the new market price. If he's willing to pay just 10% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 10%. If he's willing to pay 300% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 300%. His price is higher than the first 50 people are willing to pay, so they choose simply not to buy a HDD at his price. Consequently there are only 50 people left who want to buy HDDs, and only 50 HDDs for sale.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:4)
In a resource shortage, yes, the very wealthy can always get what they want. Here's a hint: the very rich can always get what they want, period. They're rich. In the worst-case scenario, they can bribe whoever is in charge of things. Hard drives, however, are both a consumer product and a business product. Business products are valued much more highly, for good reason - they are the tools you use to make money. Practically, the price increases led me to use a spare 1 TB HD to build a DVR, instead of buying a 2 TB drive. In a year or two, I'll get a 3-4 TB drive for a price I feel is fair, and in the meantime someone's company has gotten a 2-3 TB drive to use for their database.
Re: (Score:3)
Another funny thing about markets is how they invariably get replaced by rationing when the survival of a nation is at stake. When the German U-boat blockade of England in World War II prevented supplies coming in, the lowly, suboptimal, rationing method was more reliable and fair than free markets (Incidentally , it also prevented rioting and a civil war. What do you think would have happened if half a million of the poorest British subjects suddenly were unable to buy
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:4, Informative)
Rationing for survival is not more "fair" than a market. It means that the state provides goods at a price lower than their actual cost in order for the poorest to be able to purchase them. It's just another form of welfare, and is no more or less legitimate or fair for being so.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not at all. There's nothing inevitable or deterministic in your suggestion. The secondary market isn't relevant to all the participants of the primary round-robin system. Most participants will use the hard drive they got for their own projects (that's why they joined the round-robin queue in the first place). A small fraction only will decide to defer their projects, and sell their drive on a secondary market
Re: (Score:2)
Not at all. There's nothing inevitable or deterministic in your suggestion. The secondary market isn't relevant to all the participants of the primary round-robin system. Most participants will use the hard drive they got for their own projects (that's why they joined the round-robin queue in the first place). A small fraction only will decide to defer their projects, and sell their drive on a secondary market.
Only very briefly. Then the bureaucrats responsible for running the system, or the guys driving the van that delivers them, will realise that they can make life much better for themselves by "losing" half the supply and selling it on the secondary market. Go look at the USSR for what happens when you try and run a society on something like round-robin.
The state ensures that all the population is able to obtain access to goods, and that is exactly as fair and legitimate as letting people die in the streets?
Yup. It ultimately depends on how you define fairness - whether the fair way to get more resources is to work for them, or to have more children and have the
Re: (Score:3)
A small fraction only will decide to defer their projects, and sell their drive on a secondary market.
You mean, everyone who values their drive more than the secondary market price will use it on their project. But what happens when people who don't want or need a hard drive join the queue because they know the secondary market price is higher than the round-robin price?
You're right that I started mixing up price and cost as terms there near the end. I meant "price" throughout.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem with your example is that it's well documented that there was a thriving black market in Britain during the second world war, and those willing to pay the butcher the price he wanted for the "extra" sausages he had acquired would eat better than those who couldn't.
Re: (Score:3)
Sorry, I meant to reply to this. That point is somewhat irrelevant. The unfairness I'm talking about isn't that the rich are privileged. To be sure, it's distasteful, but not a fatal flaw on its own. The fatal flaw is that in a resource shortage, the very poor never get anything (in a free market economy). A fair system has to ensure that all the participants regularly get access to everything that's being traded.
Your example
Re: (Score:2)
you implicitly accept that because you have faith that the prices will come down, and your projects are merely deferred in time.
Well, no, there are just some things I will never be able to afford. A hard drive isn't likely to be one of those things, courtesy of Moore's Law, but if it turns out that large hard drives always cost more than I want to spend, then I suppose I won't buy any large hard drives.
A fair system has to ensure that all the participants regularly get access to everything that's being traded
No, it need not do that at all. If you're talking about starvation, then I would be totally on board with providing a food subsidy to people who can't afford to eat - but I want to be honest about it. Price controls are a way for gov
Re: (Score:2)
Are you saying that you believe it is fair that there are some experiences in life that can never have because the number of zeros in your bank account is too small?
Re: (Score:3)
OK, so everyone in the world should have their own personal Boeing 747. But they don't make themselves. So the only way for everyone to have one is to get lots of people to build them. Even if we put everybody in the world to work building them, I doubt they could produce enough for everyone to have one each.
And of course, if everyone is bu
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:4, Funny)
Let's not be hasty. *You* aren't worthy to have one. Paris Hilton however, is.
No, in short: the opposite of "there are some experiences in life that [you] can never have because the number of zeros in your bank account is too small" is "there are some experiences in life that you can only have if your bank account is sufficiently large".
It's ok to believe that last sentence is fair, and that you aren't worthy like Paris. It's a free country and everyone's opinion counts, more or less.
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're thinking too short-term. Say the government forced manufacturers to keep HDDs at their original price and sell them via lottery. The 50 HDDs would sell out. The manufacturers would look at the how much money they're making per HDD, and conclude they don't provide enough profit for them to repair their factories. Consequently, next month when the next batch arrives, there are 50 HDDs again, and 150 people (the 50 who didn't get one last time + 100 new people) wanting to buy them.
Your attempt at fair HDD distribution means there's a constant shortage. Then one day, some of the poorer people who got a HDD suddenly realizes that he can resell it for a lot more than they paid for it. A black market appears. Lots of other people who don't need HDDs realize the price differential between your fixed price and the true market price provides an arbitrage opportunity, and they enter the lottery for HDDs. Now you have 50 HDDs being produced per month, and 5000 people wanting to buy them. So of the 50 HDDs you're selling via lottery, only about 5 end up in the hands of people who actually need a HDD, the other 45 go to resellers flipping them on the black market for a profit. So most of the people who need HDDs are actually paying the higher price despite your price fixing, and the extra money is going to flippers instead of the manufacturers so there's no incentive for them to fix your real problem - a shortage of HDDs.
OTOH, if you allow the market price to increase, it provides the manufacturers the resources and the incentive to repair their factories and increase supply. Other companies who used to make HDDs but scaled it back look at the higher price, and say hey, there's a lot of money to be made, we should start making HDDs again. Next month they make 60 HDDs, and the price creeps down. Next month they make 85 HDDs and the price drops some more. And the next back they make 110 HDDs. The 10 extra means people who didn't get a HDD in previous months gradually get theirs. Eventually everyone who previously wanted a HDD gets one. Next month there are 100 new people who want HDDs.
Now the reverse of the previous situation happens. There are only 100 people who want HDDs, but the manufacturers are still making 110. There's an oversupply. The manufacturers cut their prices below the 100-drive level to try to sell out their drives before their competitors can. The market price now settles at the lowest price the 100th seller is willing to sell for. The extra 10 HDDs carry over to the next month and now there's a 20 drive oversupply, driving the price even lower. Eventually some of the manufacturers see their dropping profit, cry uncle, and scale back production. The manufacture of HDDs stabilizes again at 100 per month, exactly matching demand.
This isn't a system which favors sellers over buyers. It treats both the same. Sellers are at an advantage when there's a shortage. Buyers are at an advantage when there's oversupply (which is the state the HDD industry has been in most of the time - why IBM sold off its storage division to Hitachi, who is now trying to sell it to Western Digital). The price fluctuations are the feedback mechanism which cause manufacturers to produce more or fewer drives in response to demand. Eliminate it and you break the economy.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's take the steps again, but more slowly and carefully. The lottery system is the
Re: (Score:2)
The key point is that supply isn't guaranteed. I know we're reaching the realms of fantasy here, but imagine that a factory gets destroyed by a natural disaster.
In addition, if there wasn't a shortage, why would we need your cockamamie lottery
Re: (Score:2)
Supply is never 100% guaranteed. Distribution is not evenly guaranteed in a free market. Instead it is skewed towards those who have the most money to spend. Other systems, such as a lottery, have different properties, like a distribution without
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, there's the round robin method. Put 100 people in a queue. The person at the front gets served and must go to the back of the queue afterwards. So the first time there's a shortage, people #1 to #50 get the drives. The second time there's a shortage, people #51 to #100 get the drives.
Another method is to pick 50 people out of 100 randomly and let them have the available drives. This doesn't require to implement a queue, but has a s
Re: (Score:2)
'Fairness' should factor in importance of the drive. Funnily enough, increasing prices does that quite effectively.
Re: (Score:2)
You really need that explained? Or are you just trying to get me to say something so you can make a speech about what the word important means?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The fairness of this then is inversely proportionate to the gap between the rich and the poor. In absence of any regulation or mitigation this results in effect that the rich people are more important than the poor people.
In democracies if this is too blatant it can be dangerous for the rich, since the poor people out-vote the rich people. But in many places the poorer people are ignorant
Re: (Score:2)
if it's important for you then you pay xxx amount of money for it. the only reason you'd buy a drive is that it's important to you, the more important it is the more you're willing to pay and not use the money for something else you think of as important. that doesn't mean a market is a flawed system for distributing non-essential goods which will not cause a riot if in short supply(AND in such a case that it would cause riots it would be just as well to just distribute everyone equal amounts of _money_ in
Re: (Score:2)
That's seems a remarkably stupid way to allocate limited resources.
We have 15 units of wheat seeds. In order to not starve to death (and replinish seed stocks) we need to plant at least five. There are 6 farmers who could each plant a unit. There 5 bakers who would rather just use the wheat as is to make food. There are 5 artists who would like to make
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
the communist method.
everyone orders the car and the plumber and they'll arrive 10 years from today, for the price they are today.
sure, the market system isn't fair, but it's fair to the seller - and the normal people who got the disks from some random queue would be selling them on ebay or black markets anyhow if they had higher value than what they paid for.
Re: (Score:2)
That's not strictly true. Percent are percent, and are dimensionless.
However the reason percentages (or relative changes, delta-Q over Q) are used in elasticities is to make the result the same regardless of whether the prices are in Dollars per hundredweight or Lira per kilogram.
Re: (Score:2)
See also: greed.
I'm also betting you that prices won't ever come down to their pre-shortage levels unless a glut develops
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on the slope of the supply-demand curve.
Econ 101.
Re:Something wrong here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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: (Score:2)
I did #2 I bought a handful of terabyte Hitachi drives...on sale at some less than agile big box retailer. I repeated that a couple times till the hammer fell.
I like the drives, they are quieter than seagate.
Re: (Score:2)
I.e. a simple hedging strategy.
The other part (which the GP obliquely touched on without calling it this) is Supply Chain Management [wikipedia.org] theory. If you don't know anything about SCM, it's a lot more mathematical and complicated than you might imagine.
Re: (Score:2)
Right now it's free. So it'll be a price hike of infinity percent.
Re: (Score:2)
The only shortage of air is caused by pollution.
Which industry gets away with doing for free.
Re: (Score:3)