Companies no longer have trouble supplying hard drives

Apr 28, 2012 07:56 GMT  ·  By

With each passing day, the likelihood of HDDs never becoming as affordable as they used to be becomes higher and higher, and Western Digital is not helping to prevent that.

In fact, Western Digital is a major contributing factor to the impression that HDD makers are only using the so-called HDD crisis as an excuse to keep prices at 200-300% of what they were last year.

We already saw that, even with the so-called HDD shortage, Seagate and Western Digital made big profits.

Now, to add insult to injury, we have learned that Western Digital has mostly restored inventories to what they are supposed to be.

“I am pleased to announce today that the recovery activities related to both WD operations and those of our supply chain partners impacted by the Thailand floods have reached a point where we now have the capability to adequately meet anticipated customer demand in the current quarter and beyond,” said John Coyne, chief executive officer of Western Digital.

We can definitely see why he is so giddy about this. Western Digital is, essentially, selling as many HDDs as a year ago but at double the price (or more).

There is also the advantage of time passage: after months of HDDs being overpriced, consumers have begun to resign themselves to the situation.

It is all made worse by how HDDs are slightly “cheaper” than they were in January or late December, 2012, adding to the illusion that the storage devices are worth buying now.

WD is also creating hybrid drives, HDDs with embedded NAND Flash memory. We can already see the company advertising them as cheap alternatives to SSDs, which it is also making, thus distracting potential buyers from the fact that, even then, the products are still too expensive.

Sure, there are some facilities to repair after the Thai floods, but WD and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Like Seagate, have insurance for that. Throughout this whole mess, low supply has been the only reason HDDs being overpriced. Alas, even with this problem out of the way, the issue persists.