• New here? Register here now for access to all the forums, download game torrents, private messages, polls, Sportsbook, etc. Plus, stay connected and follow BP on Instagram @buckeyeplanet and Facebook.

The impending hard drive shortage and price hikes

Jump to latest Follow Reply
Sort by date Sort by votes
Dryden

Dryden

Sober as Sarkisian
Staff member
Tech Admin
http://www.infoworld.com/t/hard-dri...rive-shortage-and-possible-price-hikes-176453

The impending hard drive shortage -- and possible price hikes

Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline

By Woody Leonhard | InfoWorld

If you're going to need hard drives this year or early next year, it would be smart to get your sources locked in now.

Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand -- notably including the largest Western Digital plant -- were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online. Thailand is a major manufacturer of hard drives, and the shutdowns have reduced the industry's output by 25 percent.

Western Digital, the largest hard disk manufacturer, makes more than 30 percent of all hard drives in the world. Its plants in Ayutthaya's Bang Pa-In Industrial Estate and Pathum Thani's Navanakorn Industrial Estate together produce about 60 percent the company's disks. Both were shut down last Wednesday. (Western Digital also has a major plant in Malaysia that hasn't been affected by the floods, so some production will likely shift to that plant.)

Cont'd ...
Click to expand...
 
Rice prices will spike as well as Thailand is the top producer of rice for the world and at least 1/10th of it's total arable land for rice, and the crops that were planted there, are destroyed by too much water in the padis.
 
Upvote 0
​
Activity:
Practice counting with fingers
Hold up one hand with your palm facing your child. Point to and count each finger. Hold up a few fingers and say the rhyme (below), inserting the number of fingers you are holding up into the words. Point to and count each finger, inviting your child to count along on their own fingers.
 
Upvote 0
OCBuckWife;2019469; said:
Rice prices will spike as well as Thailand is the top producer of rice for the world and at least 1/10th of it's total arable land for rice, and the crops that were planted there, are destroyed by too much water in the padis.
Click to expand...

Don't know that an uptick in rice prices will dent my wallet. My rice consumption is limited to my once-a-month trip to Chipotle.

I do eat up a lot of hard drives at work, particularly WD VelociRaptors and Seagate Savvios, both of which are impacted by the flooding.
 
Upvote 0
Dryden;2019499; said:
Don't know that an uptick in rice prices will dent my wallet. My rice consumption is limited to my once-a-month trip to Chipotle.

I do eat up a lot of hard drives at work, particularly WD VelociRaptors and Seagate Savvios, both of which are impacted by the flooding.
Click to expand...

I currently have a few TB to spare, so I can wait out any price hike for storage, but have needed a SSD for awhile. Would you recommend picking up a high end SSD or one of your high end platters mentioned above as my OS device for pic / video processing
 
Upvote 0
jwinslow;2019509; said:
I currently have a few TB to spare, so I can wait out any price hike for storage, but have needed a SSD for awhile. Would you recommend picking up a high end SSD or one of your high end platters mentioned above as my OS device for pic / video processing
Click to expand...

I would get the best 10K+ RPM hard drive you can pair with your SATA bus. The new WD Velociraptors on new 6Gb/s SATA rev. 3 machines are stupid fast. If your motherboard is too old to enjoy that luxury, pick up a SSD and at least make use of Windows 7's Readyboost feature (right click your SSD device and enable Readyboost with a click -- BOOM, big ass RAM disk). You can find 40 - 64 Gb SSD for under $100. For as much image processing as you do, it'll make a world of difference.
 
Upvote 0
thanks I'm still rocking some budget hardware from 08. q6600, 4 GB ram, f3 spinpoint, etc. about to upgrade the GPU, probably with Scott's gtx 280.

any recommendation on a reliable ssd boot drive ? some were trying to sell the ocz drives as reliable now that the firmware updates have rolled out
 
Upvote 0
I've installed ~20 OCZs over the last 12-18 months and already bricked two. Forget them. We're having better luck with the Crucial M4s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441

Only problem with these is that they don't include a 2.5"->3.5" converter tray, so you may have some trouble finding a place to mount it unless you buy an aftermarket carrier.

That was one of the selling point of the OCZs ... those have a 3.5" tray in the box.

In your shoes, I'd switch to the Velociraptor as my OS/boot drive, run the SSD as a RamDisk, and relegate the SpinPoint to file storage.
 
Upvote 0
so would I see better performance and longevity with the velociraptor with my old mobo? IPIBL-LB

compared to using two SSD's in your suggested config

I assume the 128 GB couldn't use the extra room for the ram and keep up with the speeds of the above setups?
 
Upvote 0
You would def see better performance. Problem on the Velociraptors is the disk capacity unless you pay through the nose for the 300Gb or 600Gb versions.

I probably shouldn't comment on longevity, because as soon as I tell you that the Velociraptor is super-reliable it'll die on you in three weeks. :lol:

I will say I've built around 60 workstations and a couple low-I/O file servers with them and only have one in my brick pile. I guess I've installed maybe 80-100 of them, and have one failed one on my desk in over two years this model has been on the market. 1% is a pretty good return rate on hard drives.

The previous generation 73Gb Raptors [c. 2007] were a disaster (crazy fast, but over half of them are dead now at my company -- they just ran too hot). However, I can say I'm very happy with the reliability on these new models. I run 2-300Gb Velociraptors on my home machine, which is also an old Q6600.
 
Upvote 0
jwinslow;2026903; said:
Wow. the popular Samsung F4 2TB drive skyrocketed from 70 to 229.

for anyone like me who needs a new drive now, this is about the best option out there

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Seagate...8102739460&skuId=9419382&st=9419382&cp=1&lp=1
Click to expand...

Yeah I noticed that this week. Went to NewEgg for Velociraptors for a workstation at the office and saw the 150Gb's were up to $200 and the 300Gb's were up to $300 -- with a limit of 1 per customer. :lol:

How do I build a RAID-0 stripe when I'm only allowed to buy one disk?

Every single 2Tb drive is north of $200 except for the slowest model of the WD Green, and that's still $142. This particular drive was less than $70 before the flood.
 
Upvote 0
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top