Hard drive shortage become quite serious

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
As some of you may know, floods in Thailand took out the Western Digital hard disk factory and with it, sharply reduces the worldwide supply of drives. It unfortunately also sharply increased the cost of drives.



Now the other shoe is dropping with it impacting PC sales:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57341642-64/how-bad-is-the-hard-disk-shortage/?tag=cnetRiver

How bad is the hard disk shortage?
by Brooke Crothers December 12, 2011 3:39 PM PST

Intel's market-moving statement today that it expects a fourth-quarter revenue shortfall of roughly $1 billion has crystallized the impact of the hard disk drive shortage. So how bad is it?

A report last week from IHS-iSuppli said it's pretty bad--a preview of what Intel said today. That is, the flooding in Thailand will hit PC shipments in the first quarter. iSuppli says the shortfall will be about 3.8 million PCs.

And it will knock down PC numbers for the whole year. Global PC shipments for the whole of 2012 are now expected to expand by only 6.8 percent in 2012, down from the previous outlook of 9.5 percent growth, according to iSuppli.

Let's look at the highlights of what Intel executives said today in a conference call, as they were pretty straightforward about the shortage's severity.

It's the first quarter where things really get dicey: "We do expect...[the] shortage of HDDs to be pretty significant in the early part of 2012," said Stacy J. Smith, Intel's chief financial officer today to analysts in the call.

Smith added that things have taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of weeks as customers have reduced future orders for Intel chips as they realize that they can't get enough hard drives for their computers. "It's really been in the last couple of weeks as the big hard disk drive manufacturers have given their statement of supply on a customer-by-customer basis that we saw a quick dropping off of backlog as customers aligned the purchases of microprocessors with future shipment of an HDD," Smith said.

What kind of computers are getting hit the hardest?: In a word, PCs. "Server has been relatively strong but we're seeing a pretty significant reduction in backlog in the PC-related segment of our business so that seems to be where it's really hitting us," said Smith.

When will supply catch up with demand? That's not clear. Intel is only guessing at this point. "We expect supply to catch up to overall demand sometime in the first half of 2012. Where exactly that happens over the course of the first half, too early to say, but we do expect that this will catch up sometime in the first half," said Smith.

And what about solid-state drives? So far, Intel has not seen a significant pick-up in solid-state drive orders. But that may change as more SSD-packing ultrabooks hit the market and companies reassess HDDs. "So far, we have not seen a big uptick in demand for SSDs. That said, I do expect that to happen. I think it will be one of the ways that the industry helps offset some of the HDD shortage," said Smith.

What's happening on the street at retailers? Retailers still have drives but some of the bigger stores have sold out of the least expensive variety. And prices are going up, up, up. "Prices are going up tremendously," said a sales representative at Fry's Electronics, whose warehouse-size stores sell lots disks to consumers.

"And we're all out of OEM (original equipment manufacturer) drives. Those are the ones shipped from the manufacturer without any packaging or retail box. We're pretty much all out of those," he said. "Those were the cheap ones. All we have is the boxed (more expensive) ones now."

How much has the price of a 1TB (terabyte) drive risen? "Right now you're looking at $99 where before it was $50," the representative said, citing one of the least expensive models. And he added that prices will not be going back down for a long time. But how long a "long time" is, is anybody's guess.

(Note: a Newegg price tracker tool shows how the price of a Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB drive has stabilized a bit over the last few weeks but is still $80 above the price it was in mid-October.)
 

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
37
0
Seattle, WA
Before the flood, WD had the #1 market share in hard drives. They plan to buy Hitachi drive business which makes them even larger.

Unfortunately the hard disk industry has heavily consolidated itself. Samsung just sold its business to Seagate. So Toshiba stands as the only other supplier and they only build small form factor drives for laptops.

Companies in this tough economy do not invest in extra factories to ramp up business. So by taking out a good bit of production due to WD, there just isn't enough supply to fill the demand. So prices go up and shortages created.
 

Mark (Basspig) Weiss

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2010
682
37
940
New Milford, CT
www.basspig.com
Last summer, I was periodically checking the price of the WD1000 1TB drive that I use in one of my worstations.. it was down to $88. After the floods, it went to $298.

Maybe this will put some pressure toward SSD development and deployment.

I would be concerned about the early batches of HDDs from these flooded factories when they get started back up. Expect a lot of failures until they get the impurities out of the fabrication facility. That could take weeks and thousands of HDDs.
 

Phelonious Ponk

New Member
Jun 30, 2010
8,677
23
0
Not to worry. WD drives don't sound very good anyway. :)

Tim
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
6,455
29
405
OT

Soon the SATA cable in the HHD will be said to provide a "substantial" sonic difference ...

SO far I have seen a slow adoption for High End computer cable aside from the occasional, well-dressed with cable cocks USB-cables... I haven't seen many Cat 5 since the fabled Denon $500 Cat 5 cable
 
Last edited:

mep

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
9,481
17
0
Frantz-you may be on to something. We could create a big market in SATA audiophile cables. As for Western Digital, I never trusted their HDs.
 

FrantzM

Member Sponsor & WBF Founding Member
Apr 20, 2010
6,455
29
405
Too slow!

SOtM In-Line SATA Power Noise Filter:
http://www.sonore.us/SOtM.html

I think a British reviewer wrote about audiophile SATA cables some months ago and was ridiculed by a number of people.

Bill

:D

If a group of people is willing to accept that a few dots placed in their room, (Kombats Harmonix ),not only change but ameliorate appreciably sound reproduction in it, then this shouldn't come as a surprise..
 

About us

  • What’s Best Forum is THE forum for high end audio, product reviews, advice and sharing experiences on the best of everything else. This is THE place where audiophiles and audio companies discuss vintage, contemporary and new audio products, music servers, music streamers, computer audio, digital-to-analog converters, turntables, phono stages, cartridges, reel-to-reel tape machines, speakers, headphones and tube and solid-state amplification. Founded in 2010 What’s Best Forum invites intelligent and courteous people of all interests and backgrounds to describe and discuss the best of everything. From beginners to life-long hobbyists to industry professionals, we enjoy learning about new things and meeting new people, and participating in spirited debates.

Quick Navigation

User Menu

Steve Williams
Site Founder | Site Owner | Administrator
Ron Resnick
Site Co-Owner | Administrator
Julian (The Fixer)
Website Build | Marketing Managersing