Here comes the aftermath....

johnlgalt · November 4th, 2011, 09:31 PM

http://www.crn.com/news/client-devices/231902118/hard-drive-shortages-due-to-thailand-floods-expected-to-take-toll-on-pc-makers.htm;jsessionid=CbUystEsXET411cPGVeDcA**.eca ppj02?cid=nl_stor

Quote:

According to the firm, the hard drive industry in the fourth quarter will see its worst downturn in three years. With Q4 hard drive shipments expected to decline to 125 million units – down 27.7 percent from 173 million in the third quarter – the industry will see the largest sequential decrease on a percentage basis since the fourth quarter of 2008.

This shortage is predicted to boost average hard drive disk pricing by 10 percent in the fourth quarter.

Thailand-based hard drive manufacturers such as Western Digital and Toshiba have already been forced to halt production. In light of the stoppage, Western Digital may lose its number-one spot for most world-wide hard drive shipments in Q4, falling to third.

mikedt · November 5th, 2011, 08:04 AM

"...the industry will see the largest sequential decrease on a percentage basis since the fourth quarter of 2008."

Well if you don’t continue to innovate and make your own products obsolete, then somebody else will.

I suppose it was exactly the same for floppy disk and 8-track cartridge manufacturers. Last PC I bought, NO mechanical hard drive.

SoulTerror · November 6th, 2011, 06:49 AM

They said it's going to be down due to flooding, not because people don't want their products. Did you even read the link?

mikedt · November 6th, 2011, 05:33 PM

Yes I did, and I highlighted the part about about sales of mechanical harddrives have been on the decline for two years running, floods and production problems not withstanding. Mechanical data storage won't be around forever, they're certainly an endangered species when it comes to mobile computing, laptops, netbooks, tablets, etc.

Spinning disk storage is almost obsolete when it comes to personal media players, except probably the iPod Classic. Toshiba makes the 1.8inch drives used in the iPod, which is probably the only device now which uses drives of that size. But once Apple discontinues the iPod Classic, which they probably will sooner or later, that's the end of that. Going to be the same for 2.5inch drives, as laptops and netbooks will eventually go completely SSD.

Probably the only place in the long term for mechanical data storage will be large servers and data farms.

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