Last week, hard disk manufacturing plants in Thailand shut down due to flooding. Affected facilities include two Western Digital plants, which they estimate could be offline for up to eight months. These two plants produce approximately 60 percent of their products. (A third plant in Malaysia is unaffected by the floods.) Seagate has two Thailand facilities also, but neither are in areas affected by the flooding. Nonetheless, Seagate says “The hard disk drive component supply chain is being disrupted and it is expected that certain component in the supply chain will be constrained.” Several key hard drive component suppliers in Thailand are affected, including Nidec who makes over 70 percent of the motors used in hard drives. Temporary closures of all three of their Thailand plants means a loss of 30 percent of their production capacity. Even Toshiba, ranked fourth in hard drive production and sales numbers, struggles with the flooding. Half of its production capacity comes from a Thailand location temporarily suspending operations.
It’s still not clear what this means for customers. Hard drive prices have held steady since the fourth quarter of 2010, thanks to a combination of adequate supply and lower than predicted demand. This makes it unlikely that we’ll see any further price drops in the near future. Certain models and drive capacities may experience a temporary shortage as well. If you need a number of identical drives for a RAID array or NAS server, now might be the time to stock up!
Hey you can get 16GB of RAM for like $70-90 these days yet hard drives prices have gone up substantially and they are limiting the number you can buy at any given time. This is not the time to be building a computer/server/NAS or any project that includes a lot of spinning disks. RAM and SSDs are very reasonable now. You can pick up a 120GB SSD for about $1 per GB right now.