Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren't
With supplies back on the upswing, HDD prices have found a new, higher normal
by Sean Gallagher
Last October, flooding in Thailand took a huge bite out of hard disk drive supplies, taking out about a quarter of the world's HDD manufacturing capacity. The impact of that disaster has passed, and supply levels are back to near where they were before last October's disaster. But while the flood waters have long since receded, drive prices haven't fallen nearly as much—as InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard reports, retail hard drive prices are still about 75 percent higher than they were before the flood and show no signs of coming down. And the manufacturers are posting healthy profits as a result.
According to IHS iSuppli, the flood severely curtailed shipments of hard drives in the last quarter of 2011, which were down by 29.1 percent from the 174 million sold by the industry from July to September of 2011. By the end of the first quarter of 2012, shipments were just 16.6 percent lower. However, iSuppli reports, "the Average Selling Prices (ASPs) in the post-flood time frame were approximately 28% higher than in the pre-flood period in both quarters."
That's because PC manufacturers, who buy the largest percentage of disk drives, have locked in their prices with long-term contracts, according to Leonhard. And while the HDD manufacturers have dealt with tight supply during rebuilding, they've had fewer drives to sell through other channels—such as retail. That drove the price of drives up initially as much as 300 percent initially.
The tightening has eased since then. But hard drive manufacturers are still shipping fewer drives. For example, in an earnings call on April 26, Western Digital CEO John Coyne noted that the Thai floods "knocked out almost 90 percent of WD's slider availability and 60 percent of WD drive assembly capacity and a substantial portion of the industry supply chain," but that Western Digital and its partners had "reached the point where we now have the capability to adequately meet anticipated customer demand in the current quarter and beyond." Western Digital shipped 44.2 million hard drives in the first quarter of 2012, and had a record net profit of $483 million—a 16 percent profit margin on its $3.04 billion in sales. Seagate, whose facilities weren't directly impacted by the flood, saw a 25 percent profit margin of $1.146 billion—also a record profit.
I myself want two matched hard drives for a RAID install. I've been holding off because of the increase in prices and have not done so. I'm still waiting on prices to go down before a purchase. I'd like to get one of my NASes back up and running for personal storage. It would be nice to get 4 TB storage back to where I can access it.
I'd like to take a moment on explaining why I use the NASes and why they are important to my setup as they go beyond just storage.
Back in the day, used to be you shared files by what was on your computer. This required you have substantial storage space to provide your share. Having that storage space meant multiple hard drives in your computer. It was during this time I ran into a little malware beast the infected the MBR as a worm. Being a worm, it traveled through out your LAN infecting other HDs. Anything you burned became infected too. So when it was discovered, my first mistake was burning backups before wiping out the infected drives by format. That created two problems I was to learn later.
First problem was that formatting does not remove MBR infections as the MBR is never erased in formatting. To clean the MBR, you must take it down to the original factory condition that means the total they tell you a hard drive size is, is what you have. Once you format and prep the drive for use, the MRB and the partitioning take up space and you no longer have the total size claimed. But taking it down to that level is a special process called low-level formatting and is not done in regular formatting.
The second problem was all those backups I made were infected too. Once the drive was clean, as soon as you went and put the infected disc in the drive, you just got infected again. I had at the time a dozen drives. Fun, fun, fun.
I learned from that and no computers in my LAN now share files. Each and every one of them are independent so that a worm can not travel the system.
In order to discover which discs were infected out of a huge stack, I installed Linux. Every time Linux found win malware, it would lock up but wouldn't take the infection. All hds were formatted to Linux, a guaranteed way to end win infections.
My Nases are Linux based. It is the way I transfer files between computers. No win malware can travel this path through the network interface and make it to the other end. The NAS will catch it and lock up telling me in no uncertain terms there is a problem. I no longer do the file sharing that requires the HD space. I still do desire the protection that such a system provides.
Hard drive supplies back to pre-flood levels, but prices aren't
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