14 DAY TRIAL // Since the hard drive shortage has been making the news almost constantly, it was obvious that it would start to affect other fields, in this case that of personal computers.
There is a significant chance that PCs will be in short supply this December, as well as during the first three months of next year (2012).
At least, this is what this particular report on the part of Digitimes has to say on the matter.
The reason behind this prediction is one that most everyone keeping up to date on recent events will be familiar with.
There will just not be enough hard disk drives for all the computers that IT players would like to send out.
Even though Western Digital supposedly hasn't halted shipments yet, and even with SSDs around, PC sales are set to drop by 10%.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Acer are all given as the sources of these rumors, so there probably is something to them.
It is inevitable that solid state drives would take the place of HDDs in some systems, but they are still too expensive to actually replace them outright.
Also, while their speeds are considerable, their storage capacities are not up to par even now.
Thus, when HDD shipments really decrease (40-50% in January-March), so will inventories of everything else that uses them.
Ironically, this state of affairs might let projects like OCZ's TLC NAND memory gain more attention faster than if HDDs had been spared the flooding in Thailand.
For those who want a quick update on things, enough factories were shut down that there is only supply for about two months left.
While this doesn't mean that there will suddenly not be any more to sell after that time, it does imply that remaining production capacity will not be able to pick up the slack.
Normal production will resume in February of March 2012 (at the earliest). Until then, people will have to live with higher prices (the 10% price jump was passed a while ago).