Due to the floods in Thailand there is a serious shortage of hard disks at the moment, so much so that the market (channel) price has risen over 100% this week, and hard disks at the upper end of the supply chain are in serious constraint. It's already bitten my firm as we order bulk direct from the manufacturers. Firms holding stocks of existing hard disks have already lifted prices significantly despite having purchased them at the far lower rate of 2 weeks ago.

It would appear that Thailand is a pinch point of hard disk manufacture, not so much the complete item, but rather the components which are then assembled at other locations around the world. Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba have all appear to have been severely affected by this, The only manufacturer that seems to have escaped the worst of this is Samsung, but they obviously don't have the capacity to fill in. It's also looking like there will be an extended time period before production returns to normal - rumours are suggesting perhaps as long as 2-3 quarters, even so there'll be at least one quarter of serious supply problems.

The hard disk isn't the most sexy of items admittedly, but if yours fails and you can't get hold of one then that means no more computer.

Online backups, and thumbdrives are my friends for reasons just like this.

I think I have a 10MB MFM drive somewhere that you can have if that's any help.

Thanks mate, but I'd need 331 of them just for an afternoons photography

anyone noticed a price hike on digitec? i haven't been following so not sure by how much, if at all, retail prices have gone up.

This is exactly why I got a WD 2TB external drive just yesterday in Media Markt. It was 99chf.

Hurry while old stocks last, online dealers no longer have them at these prices and it will take some months before the situation is rectified.

That's the most important consequence of the extreme flooding? Why is the stupid news concentrating on this silly little loss of life and livelihood and ecology for millions of asians when there is the possibility that you have to pay a little bit more to troll on the internet.

Seriously, I'm quite offended.

...and what will you restore your backups onto ?

Massive hikes on the 3TB SATA-3 drives, also 3TB SATA-2 drives out of stock for weeks now.

Nowhere did he say that this was the most important consequence. Nowhere did he trivialise the dead and injured.

He reported a consequence. And yes, to some people it matters. Not much, but it affects them directly.

Fixed that for you

A much-more expensive HDD. But, the important part is not having lost the docs... BTW, will this affect solid-state drives, or simply traditional HDDs?

I guess flash based memory chips might float rather than sink like traditional HDs though?

Mechanical HD's
SSD's (ex Samsung etc) are so far unaffected.

Of course a RAID 0 approach will have kept you running through the crisis...

...or yet another reason for cloud based storage for files you need continuous access to.

In the US, I might go RAID 0, but here someone might tell me I'm being too environmentally unfriendly, powering all those HDDs...

you mean raid 1?

I wonder are any assembled or made in the EU or CH?

There isn't but even if there is, you are lacking components.. just like the earthquake in Japan has serious ripple on car manufacturing in Europe as some of the most sophisticated components are often ONLY made in Japan to protect knowledge and ownership.

The flood has been going on for quite some time now and it only just made into our news. It is tragic in human terms but the effect on our everyday life on food and technology should be made aware of and try to plan accordingly.