Seagate says it will take to the end of 2012 for hard disk drive production to recover from Thailand floods:

In fact, he's predicting a difficult road ahead for the industry given that many of Seagate's own 130 or so suppliers are still under three feet of water.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Seagate-HD-Stephen-Luczo-Toshiba-Western-Digital,14039.html

They probably raised prices just because they can.

EDIT: What happened to the days when everything was made in the USA?

Which is why they were always at these prices, because they can? It's supply and demand, not some huge HDD manufacturing conspiracy.

I wouldn't be surprised Corporations can do whatever they want
I probably said too much so...

So is every hard drive manufacturer in Thailand or something?

If they could charge these prices constantly why wouldn't they? Your beliefs are unfounded. They can't charge these prices because other companies would undercut them, there are a lot more than 1 HDD manufacturer.

No. Seagate does not have a monopoly on the HDD market.

Apparently not all of them, but a decent number of the companies that produce sub-assemblies for HDDs are there. And even just reducing overall HDD manufacturing capacity by 50% blows the whole supply/demand balance incredibly out of whack.

quite a large percentage are (were) made in Thailand.

Read the label on your HDD: likely says "made in Thailand"

So any HDD manufacturer not in Thailand has the perfect opportunity now to capture most of the market, by keeping it's costs down.

30% of the industry, 60% of WD's manufacturing facilities, and 70% of one of the main wholesale suppliers (forget the name)


That would be none of them. Every one at least has a sizable chunk of their facilities in Thailand or deal with wholesalers/parts manufacturers in Tailand.

Why you ask? Because that is where the wholesalers and parts manufacturers are, so you build your own facilities near there to reduce shipping costs. It's similar to why virtually EVERY manufacturing company has a building in Arkansas (so they can more easily get deals with Walmart)

Anyway, this is old news, March-May 2012 was expected to be the earliest the industry would start to recover, so prices up throughout 2012 is in-line with that.

Yet another example of geographically putting all your eggs in one basket. The auto industry learned that with the Japan earthquake/tsunami. A lot of critical automotive electric pieces were manufactured there and it impacted the entire auto industry worldwide when the supply was disrupted for several months.

I had a bad feeling that this was going to happen. Flooding like that isn't recovered from so quickly. While I'd like a quick rebound in the HDD industry as much as anyone, I wouldn't be surprised to not see things return to as they were just a month ago even by this time next year. Which is unfortunate, as this has suddenly made HDDs readily some of the most expensive components of most PCs, while before they'd been starting to become inconsequential in price... But SSDs are still more expensive, it would appear.

Wait, I heard that it was 25% of the industry... And that it was a majority for WD is particularly painful, given their position as the best retail producer of HDDs; while the others may have a lot of market, they are mostly going through OEMs.

It was from memory from the http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/thailand-floods-to-lead-to-hard-drive-shortages-for-months/61597 and this one for the http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20124201-64/hard-drives-could-get-scarce-apple-anolysts/. ZDNet actually says it's 40%, which seems too high for the #2 producer, so it probably is 25-30%.


Either way, it's a huge amount.

another article says Q4 2011 hdd shipments down 35% http://www.tomshardware.com/news/segate-wd-toshiba-hdd-thailand,14052.html

Just when I needed a new hard drive too. I have a WD MyBook 1TB as backup. But using that for primary use for games and such would not only hinder performance it will destroy the drive. These things have a reputation of only living a year or so with regular use before crapping out.

Actually, preassembled external hard drives still haven't been hit hard by the price hike, as many are still not overly priced. It's actually making me consider getting a few for my hard drive needs. Basically, though, if you are even considering getting a hard drive, now is definitely the time to do it rather than waiting.

No the point was that the external drives are unreliable for regular use in demanding applications or just from their high failure rates. The preassembled lines seem to be made of cheaper parts or something.

I don't trust the external Seagates either. I had one fail on me shortly after adding/moving 4-5 GB of data. I consulted a repair firm, the kind with a class 100 lab, they told me the Seagate external drives are a common occurrence with a common problem. The external drives, and some newer internal ones as well, have a coating to protect wear and tear on the platters. The coating is similar to a lacquer finish on wood, maintaining the grain while protecting it from minor scratches or harm. Under high heat and stress conditions, which can be common with hard drive use, the coating dries, cracks then flakes resulting in dust on the fast moving platters in a confined space. The hard drive is pretty much unrecoverable at that point.

I guess I'll uninstall some less commonly used applications and games so I can make room for Skyrim. It's going to need at least 10GB of free space to accommodate mods in the future.

That I would think would be common sense, especially if using horribly slow USB 2.0 as your interface :dead:

But for backups, their low quality *may* be acceptable, especially in this situation where there is such a huge price disparity between preassembled ones and putting together your own with an enclosure.

And yeah, I stay far away from Seagate. They still haven't earned back the trust from their horrible firmware issues (that seem to still be a problem, though to a lesser degree).

I'm beginning to think investing in a BluRay burner would be a great idea now. Not just because of storage, but maybe for practical use on less demanding games I still play from time to time but refuse to uninstall. Like the Legacy of Kain games. No mods, and they use the My Documents folder for saves too. I can configure installation paths via regedit and run the 'installed' games from the optical drive.

You mean the 1950's? Hate to break it to you, but American companies have been gradually relocating or outsourcing more and more of their labor force to other countries for a loooong time. A lot of Americans still have an image in their heads of the U.S. as an industrial juggernaut, but that hasn't been true for decades. We got nothin' on China. Besides, most storage companies were never U.S. companies to begin with. :shrug:

BD max (AFAIK: 12x) read speed is slower than USB 2.0. The standard read speed is only 10 megabytes/second. Installing games to BD media would be incredibly slow.

But the optical disc would be a 100 times more durable than the external hard drives (provided I don't abuse or drop it).

Hint: I'm more worried about a drive crapping out and having to reinstall and/or lose precious data. I lost a mod I was working on once because of the seagate incident.

You don't understand, you couldn't feasably install a game to a BD because the read speed would make it impossible to play even low-demand games.

a little up dated news on Q42011 http://www.tomshardware.com/news/HDD-THailand-Seagate-Western-Digital-DEll,14104.html