Hard Drive Prices Bump Up Due to Flooding in Asia

The floods on Thailand are having a major impact on hard drive prices, with prices bumping up about 15% since last week, with more price increases possible.

Larry O'Conner at OWC comments on the situation:

This is nothing less than a disaster both human – and for HDD supply –also impacting some optics makers in addition to other technology producers.

Plants that produce 60% of WesterDigital’s drives are under water right now in addition to having been offline for 2-4 weeks prior to this due to inaccessibility.

Subcomponent manufacturers also flooded that produce HDD parts fro WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and to a lesser degree Hitachi.

Bottom line- market now projected 74 to 90 million drives SHORT vs. 4th quarter need just between Seagate and WD. There isn’t a surplus to cover that and current prices likely to go higher depending, but we are hearing some of our current prices below replacement cost. Doing what we can to hold SOLUTION prices – but drive-only prices rising...