Hard Drive Shortage Relief Coming In Q1 2012

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."

Re:Market pressures.

[philip.paradis]

Anyway, how is one supposed to be "efficient" with regards to JPG, MP3, and other highly-compressed file formats?

That largely depends on how many copies of such items you're storing, or in some cases how similar blocks in various files are, even if they're not exact copies of one another. For organizations with large storage requirements and a fair amount of duplicate data being stored for various reasons, things like ZFS [slashdot.org] with deduplication can go a long way toward more efficiently managing those requirements.

Re:Something wrong here...

[Colonel Korn]

...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:First quarter of 2012?

[artor3]

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:Something wrong here...

[Solandri]

Just to elucidate, a x% reduction in amount of HDDs does not translate into an x% increase in price (which is impossible since the units are different). It results in an x% reduction in number of people who can buy HDDs.

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:Good News...

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Market pressures.

[parlancex]

We had to provision 2 new 16 disk storage arrays for network backups, and ended up paying about 3x what it should've cost for the storage. Needless to say our department's budget isn't looking as good as it could.

Re:Market pressures.

[rrohbeck]

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:Something wrong here...

[demonlapin]

Your other post approved round-robin. That just pushes the competition into the secondary market, where people realize that they got a hard drive worth $200 for $100. So they resell the drive, the cost to the business remains the same, but the transaction cost goes up. Great! UPS, FedEx, and the Postal Service win!

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:Something wrong here...

[martin-boundary]

Given that this is a discussion, it seems obvious that I'm likely to disagree with your position and that I shall argue against your explanation. But I assure you this isn't personal, I'm only interested in the ideas. Although perhaps the AC has already said most of what should be said.

Re:Market pressures.

[fa2k]

Sometimes the OS cache is not smart though. On Linux, if you do a grep over a huge dataset or a backup, then all of the useful files you had in cache are wiped out and replaced with that data. I wish Linux could adopt a more sophisticated algorithm, like ZFS has. Granted, it's difficult for the OS to predict whether a file will be accessed once or hundreds of times in the future, but it makes sense to check if it's *frequently* used and not just if it's recently used.