14 DAY TRIAL // Yet again hard disk drives are being looked at by the media, though this time it seems they are being portrayed in a more promising light than the past month or so.
Not that they are in any way suffering from some degradation that reduces their marketing appeal, not in the strict sense.
They continue to be the mainstream, widespread means of storing data on a hard disk drive.
They also continue to be much more capacious and affordable than solid state drives.
The problem they have been having, however, is that there haven't been so many of them to go around, though at least this situation could ameliorate if new rumors are true.
Stores and retailers haven't exactly been left without HDDs to sell, but the fear that shortages will persist throughout 2012 led to price jumps.
The official rise was 10% on average, but it was obvious enough that some even doubled in price.
Also, Dell and HP haven't exactly painted a pretty picture either (they are the latest to give their opinion on the matter).
Digitmes, on the other hand, reports that there are chances of everything improving in December (2011).
Some retailers that piled up their inventories, fearing that they wouldn't be able to find more drives later, are about to do the opposite starting next month.
That should start a sort of domino effect and last through January and February, 2012, finally getting hard drives back at their previous level by the end of Q1.
Shortages could last longer but weak PC demand will act as a sort of buffer for prices.
Nidec, the main provider of HDD motors, was able to restart its Thailand operations quite fast after flooding. This didn't seem to act as enough of a mood lifter before, but companies have been looking to other plans to pick up where Thailand plants left off, so that helps.