14 DAY TRIAL // Hard disk drives have long stayed ahead of solid state drives primarily thanks to their prices, besides their high capacities, but it looks like the former asset might just loose some relevance in the wake of a certain disaster.
For many years now, hard disk drives have been the primary means of giving storage space to any sort of computer and even some consumer electronics.
A more recently developed solution is the solid state drive, which comes with its own benefits and disadvantage compared to HDDs.
While much faster and completely silent, and enduring, they aren't really near HDD capacities and cost much more.
Unfortunately for HDDs, the price gap might just get a bit smaller starting in the second quarter, because of a certain event that happened last month.
Basically, the earthquake and tsunamis that ravaged Japan on March 11 did quite a bit of damage to certain facilities or left them shut down due to power outages.
Among the most affected are three wafer plants belonging to Texas Instruments, which won't be able to resume shipments before September.
As such, there will be a visible shortage in the supply of controller chips for the motors used in HDDs, leading to, obviously, shortage of such products themselves.
Western Digital and Seagate both receive chips from TI and STMicroelectronics, so they both will have to deal with this issue.
All in all, prices of HDDs are expected to rise by 5 to 10 percent and shipments will be of around 100 million for the second quarter, quite a drop from the 160 million of the first one.
It is interesting to note that prices in the channel have already risen 10-15 percent, so consumers might just want to buy a new one of these items sooner rather than later or they might be faced with a shorter number of options, budget-wise.