Hard Drive Shortage Coming

[jyl]

There are huge floods going on in Thailand. Industrial parks where the country's technology manufacturing plants are located have been inundated, plants that aren't flooded have been shut down, other plants can't get components from closed plants or can't ship over destroyed roads.

One part of the tech supply chain that is heavily concentrated in Thailand is hard drives. About 40-50% of global hard drive production is done in Thailand. Practically every major company in the industry has operations there. Nidec makes 70% of spindle motors, they have 6 plants in Thailand, and 1 to 3 are damaged. Other companies that make motors, heads, suspensions, media (disks) and other components are there. Western Digital has about 35-40% share of global hard drives, and 60% of their drives are made in Thailand. Seagate has about 35-40% share, and about 40% of their drives are made in Thailand. Hitachi and Toshiba also make drives there. The only major drive maker not located at least partly in Thailand is Samsung.

Western Digital shipped 58MM drives in Sep quarter. They just said in the Dec quarter, they expect to ship 22MM to 26MM - less than half. Seagate has said their production will be hit, but hasn't given numbers yet. Some of Toshiba's plants there are shut down, don't know how long.

Here is the impact. Global hard drive units were expected to be about 170MM in Dec quarter, and global production was expected to be about the same. It looks like production capacity equal to 40MM to 60MM units will now be non-functioning in the Dec qtr. A shortage of about 25%. Which is huge.

The industry runs very lean. There is about 4 weeks of inventory at the distributors, 2 weeks at the systems companies' assemblers, and about 1-3 weeks held by the hard drive companies. Only about 8 weeks of inventory.

The hard drive companies are already scrambling to allocate the inadequate supply. Most likely the most important customers will get the best treatment (Dell, Apple, IBM, EMC, etc). Probably the most profitable business will get some (branded hard drives sold at retail). Distributors are the least profitable customers, and they will probably not get anywhere what they need.

And pricing will go up, a lot.

So - if you will need a new hard drive in the next couple of quarters, buy it now.

[jyl]

Interesting. I went to buy an external drive at NewEgg, and the 1TB and 2TB Western Digitals and Seagates I clicked on were sold out. I didn't check every one, though. Bought a 3TB Hitachi.

[nota]

soon to be as dead as flopies anyway
SSD is the wave of the future

[jyl]

No. Look into the relative cost of NAND and HDD, per GB and in capital investment, and the relative size of the two markets. I suspect you'll come to a different conclusion after analysis.

The vast majority of the world's data will be on HDD for many years to come. The majority of the devices we hold in our hands will use SSD. The majority of data will not be held in our hands.

[Tobra]

My sister was the lead engineer who set up a few factories in Thailand. Broke her ankle there and had to come back because she would not have it fixed there. Rode a plane with a broken ankle halfway around the world, pretty tough dhick.

[willtel]

Apparently there is also Nikon factory that is also a total loss.

The situation in Thailand doesn't look good for Nikon | Nikon Rumors

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by jyl

No. Look into the relative cost of NAND and HDD, per GB and in capital investment, and the relative size of the two markets. I suspect you'll come to a different conclusion after analysis.

The vast majority of the world's data will be on HDD for many years to come. The majority of the devices we hold in our hands will use SSD. The majority of data will not be held in our hands.

What does that mean? I have no idea what those acronyms stand for.

[jyl]

HDD hard drive using rotating magnetic disk
SSD solid state drive using NAND (flash memory)

[Por_sha911]

There is a nasty downside to SSDs using NAND. When one of them crashes, there is no recovery. Gone toast (and don't tell me the drive is just pinning for the Fjords).
I know that many thing that off site storage is the way to go but what happens if one of them goes belly up and you lose all your data (like what happened with photo storage companies a few years ago) or someone hacks the server? Impossible? Wasn't it recently reported that SSL was hacked? The greatest level of security is isolation from outside access.

[jyl]

Use redundant HDDs for bulk of data, and for backup. Use SSD for OS and apps, and have that backed up too. That's my theory anyway.

I am having 1+ HDD failure per year now. I guess there are a lot of drives spinning in my house, maybe yours too. That's why I went and bought an extra HDD last night.

[sammyg2]

Those of us dinosaurs who use the same computer and hard drive for the better part of a decade won't even notice.

I've only ever had one HHD fail on me, and that was a 240 meg drive that was original in a 486sx50 puter I bought in the mid 90's.
I still have a 420 meg drive running piggy-backed in my home puter for who knows what reason, it's been in there forever and never saw a reason to take it out.

Anuther reason why I won't buy a laptop. I can change a hard drive on my desktop puter in 5 minutes, but them laptops aint zackly user friendly on the inside.

[jyl]

I think, with no facts to back it up, that HDDs are not as reliable today.

[jyl]

Heard info from one large distributor. A week ago, had 200K HDD in invtry. Now have almost none. And not getting shipments. This isn't a retailer, they supply retailers.

[RWebb]

we should all go back to rotating magnetic drum memory

[dad911]

Sweet......It will drive up the price of the 20 gig drives I have, and I can sell them on eBay.....

[sammyg2]

Cassette tape drives are pretty reliable ........

[LWJ]

Being a greedy SOB, I am wondering how I can personally profit from this?

[jyl]

Seagate just said they plan/hope to ship 40-50MM drives in Dec quarter, not too much less than Sep quarter. They say their Thailand facilities are undamaged and running, subject to component supply. And they have only 40% of production in Thailand, vs WD 60%.

[Scuba Steve]

Now I can finally unload those 20MB SCSI hard drives I salvages from some Mac SEs a while back!