WD HDD Industry Will Be Supply Constrained Due to Thailand Flooding

[AnimeJanai]

Most drives and drive parts are made in china anyways.     So why don't the chinese suppliers ramp up production even more to take advantage of the market?   The chinese companies that make the raw parts could also decide this is a good time for them to make hard drives of their own seeing as how they make the parts with the exception of the controller, heads, hub, and platters.

So, with those thailand factories underwater, the actual shortage is technically that of heads, platters, and wave-soldered controller boards?

[Lupin]

Most drives and drive parts are made in china anyways.     So why don't the chinese suppliers ramp up production even more to take advantage of the market?   The chinese companies that make the raw parts could also decide this is a good time for them to make hard drives of their own seeing as how they make the parts with the exception of the controller, heads, hub, and platters.

So, with those thailand factories underwater, the actual shortage is technically that of heads, platters, and wave-soldered controller boards?

Most of the HDD parts are not made in a single place. For example, Hitachi makes the platters in the US and Japan, the drive electronics in China and Taiwan, drive heads are diffused in the Philippines, etc. Those are then sent to Thailand for assembly.

You can't just ramp up production on another location. You need space, time and money to setup. And since these are harddrives, you need clean rooms, which should be certified first before it can start production.

Expect more problems in the HDD market in the coming months/years now that China can cut off rare earth shipments at will just to inflate prices

[ColdFission]

Yeah, saw the prices spike over at NCIX. I do have plans on building a new rig next year and I am glad that I have some spare drives around thanks to my recent RMA with WD.

[AnimeJanai]

Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too?   I still see their prices dropping.  This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.

[Reesebiz]

I got nothing to worry about. I already have 2 WD external HDDs.

[Ultra_Magnus]

China can cut off rare earth shipments at will just to inflate prices

Well, I guess they are just learning from American companies like de beers.

[kitamesume]

Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too?   I still see their prices dropping.  This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.

damn... i'd like a 60GB variant for 70$ please and thank you, gotta be a badass bootdrive, heh.

Edit: locally available, shipping cost would just ramp up out-of-country orders...

[AceD]

I was wondering why the price had gone up, i don't really bother with the news outside my own country too much -__-. Just hope it drops again before my latest HD fills up 

[vuzedome]

I do not like my situation.
With 1TB drives priced at 105 USD, it's just not happening.
Hell, external 750GB costs only 83 USD, but again it's external.

[Tatsujin]

I don't want to start a new thread since some of what I want to say is related to this topic. So ... I've checked several sites I go to and the prices for HDD's sky rocketed really high. When do you guys think the prices will calm and go back to normal and how they used to be for HDD's? At the moment, I'm not interested in SSD products. If someone can predict or give a theory of when the prices of HDDs will come down so I can plan a head of time for the future. Thanks.

[Sosseres]

I don't want to start a new thread since some of what I want to say is related to this topic. So ... I've checked several sites I go to and the prices for HDD's sky rocketed really high. When do you guys think the prices will calm and go back to normal and how they used to be for HDD's? At the moment, I'm not interested in SSD products. If someone can predict or give a theory of when the prices of HDDs will come down so I can plan a head of time for the future. Thanks.

Flooding is expected to continue for another week at least. After that they have to asses which factories that still are operational, with water, electricity and so on functional. Then they have to start producing from whatever works. Then start replacing what was broken or needs long set up times to get exactly correctly working.

3 months, minimum.

[Natheria]

Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too?   I still see their prices dropping.  This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.

I highly doubt a price increase. The severe dollar/GB price gap is the very reason why the HDD market still exists. If anything this an opportune time for them to emphasize SSDs more. This spike may create more demand for SSDs given that for the moment, the price gap has shrunk even more.

[vuzedome]

Time to get cheap and reliable SSD for system and do some cleaning(deleting) with the old stuff.

[Ultra_Magnus]

@vuzedome, dude, I have hard drives in storage bigger than some of yours, why do you have so many small ones?

Would it cause a sympathetic price rise in solid-state drives too?   I still see their prices dropping.  This is an example of SSD on sale in a local Fry's retail store.

I highly doubt a price increase. The severe dollar/GB price gap is the very reason why the HDD market still exists. If anything this an opportune time for them to emphasize SSDs more. This spike may create more demand for SSDs given that for the moment, the price gap has shrunk even more.

And won't a increase in demand increase prices?  unless of course the is a similar increase in supply.

[AnimeJanai]

@Ultra_Magnus
Probably because he buys as additional storage gigabytes are needed as opposed to people who swap out multiple drives for bigger ones.  It's the way I buy drive storage too, so I still have some older almost full 250GB drives hanging on at the tail end.  When the next drive is bought, some of the older drives content will be migrated into the new larger drive.   This gradual migration not only saves money, but ensures that if the newer drives are unreliable, I don't get a whole bunch of drives going bad at the same time.  It's amazing what the quality control in chinese HDD factories will let through in HDD manufactured for Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi.  I remember buying one nasty 2TB 32MBcache hitachi drive (made in china) whose drive cache read 25MB in size as if one 8MB section of the cache had gone bad.

Seagate and Western Digital are the only two HDD "makers" now due to samsung and hitachi being bought up and merged.  As I see it, a lot of their discount drives are rebadged ones wholly manufactured in China so my impression of Seagate or WD is that they are a shadow of what they are used to be as companies.  Buying up competitors allows them to control the market pricing as there is no longer one "rogue" HDD supplier out there to supply drives at a low price if the other HDD suppliers decide to raise their prices in a gamble to manipulate the overall prices higher regardless of supply vs demand.  Capitalism doesn't mean companies follow the supply vs demand rule of pricing; it means they try to manipulate the market prices higher whenever they can.   What the HDD market needs right now is for a 3rd supplier from China to emerge to keep Seagate and WD more honest in their drive pricing.

[Lupin]

I do not like my situation.
With 1TB drives priced at 105 USD, it's just not happening.
Hell, external 750GB costs only 83 USD, but again it's external.

You're better off compare to mine. I just retired my second to the last Seagate drive (500GB) and now have to move its contents to the rest of the drives:

(click to show/hide)

I'm buying two 2TB WD greens tomorrow (~100 USD each) while they're still cheap here.

[vuzedome]

I daisy chained and partitioned them.
And I have 3 other 1TBs sitting on my desk as paper weight, damn WDs.

[per]

I daisy chained and partitioned them.
And I have 3 other 1TBs sitting on my desk as paper weight, damn WDs.

I don't really need more space right now:


Buuuuut last week three drives (1.5Tb) in my RAID decided it was time to die (they had all run out of spare sectors. Within a few days of each other). The week before another drive died.

Not really optimal timing. I had two spare drives (one real spare, and then my storage drive in my desktop computer), but now I had to buy four new HDD:s just to be somewhat safe (considering that four drives have died within 2 weeks of each other).

At least they died in such a way that the raid survived. I only really have a 2-drive safety factor. When the third died it was just luck that I did not lose it all (one chance in three for a total RAID failure.).

So. I now have 4x 1.5Tb 2.9 year old seagate drives, all four with 4097 bad sectors according to S.M.A.R.T laying around.

Hm. I just noticed that they are covered by warranty for 26 days more. Then it's not all that bad, I guess.

[krumm]

(click to show/hide)

I daisy chained and partitioned them.
And I have 3 other 1TBs sitting on my desk as paper weight, damn WDs.

I don't really need more space right now:

Buuuuut last week three drives (1.5Tb) in my RAID decided it was time to die (they had all run out of spare sectors. Within a few days of each other). The week before another drive died.

Not really optimal timing. I had two spare drives (one real spare, and then my storage drive in my desktop computer), but now I had to buy four new HDD:s just to be somewhat safe (considering that four drives have died within 2 weeks of each other).

At least they died in such a way that the raid survived. I only really have a 2-drive safety factor. When the third died it was just luck that I did not lose it all (one chance in three for a total RAID failure.).

So. I now have 4x 1.5Tb 3.1 year old seagate drives, all four with 4097 bad sectors according to S.M.A.R.T laying around.

It sounds like you got all your drives from the same batch.  Using drives from the same batch in a raid array kinda defeats the purpose of redundant.

[per]

It sounds like you got all your drives from the same batch.  Using drives from the same batch in a raid array kinda defeats the purpose of redundant.

Well, I did order them from two different suppliers. But, yes I guess they just delivered them in-order, so to speak.

The only way to not get them from the same batch that I can see is to either go to an actual physical store with a lot of drives and intentionally try to pick them from different batches. Or order one drive from 20 different stores. The latter will be more expensive.

And I can see how one batch can have similar mechanical issues, but for me it's the media that has broken down at the same time (except for one drive that just stopped responding to commands)

Next time I will probably buy from a few more different stores, now that you gave me the idea. But that is a few years away still, since almost 50% of the diskspace is free after almost three years. And since I am replacing failing 1.5T drives with 2T drives eventually the raid will be bigger (once all five drives in a stripe have failed).