14 DAY TRIAL // We already spoke about how the floods in Thailand have or will disrupt the activities of the world's top HDD makers and, it turns out, December will see some real shortages.
Cutting right to the chase, hard disk drives are in serious danger of ending up in short supply during the final month of the ongoing year (2011).
This is because of factors that aren't exactly the same as what has caused the woes on other segments of IT, like DRAM and chips overall.
Instead, while HDD suppliers did reduce their inventory levels somewhat, the real problem is what was caused by the floods in Thailand.
People may or may not have heard about the natural disaster in Thailand, where waters swept in an disrupted lives and operations.
The damage is not as severe as the one in Japan, back in March, but still enough to leave dead behind and a lot of destruction.
Both Western Digital and Seagate have factories in the country, and while the latter managed to get off easy, the former was not as fortunate.
Basically all WD's facilities had to be closed, because of water ingress and employees getting cut off from them.
Al in all, there was significant disruption to the world's overall hard disk drive operations, so there won't be as many hard disks on sale soon.
In fact, Digitimes says that, although the existing inventories will last until the end of November, December will not be as fortunate.
In other words, when the holiday shopping season finally arrives, there will probably be higher prices and fewer drives on sales that during most, if not all, previous such occasions.
Things aren't made any better by that fact that, in addition to WD and Seagate, Thailand also houses factories belonging to TDK, Toshiba, HDD component maker Min Aik Technology and Cal-Comp Electronics.