[ale] HDD prices to spike - flooding in Thailand

[Scott Castaline]

Just checked on Newegg prices for WD HDDs. A drive I bought on Oct. 11 
for $209 is now $309

On 10/31/2011 02:16 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>
> Its worse than even Aaron thinks. The biggest issue is ALL the motors 
> for drives are made in factories now under water there.
> At work, orders for drives are being canceled by suppliers until they 
> get a firm price from existing stockpiles.  But as we all know, tech 
> makets are huge into 'just in time' production.  So the stockpiles are 
> basically just supplies awaiting pickup on shipping. The last ready 
> drives were shipped out while roads were still passable so only the 
> factories in Ireland and Malaysia are still running. The Irish has 
> excess capacity available as they were being phased out for Thailand.  
> But, no motors means no drives.
> So drives get shipped to vendors with connections and deep pockets.
> It looks like the time when the ram boat sank in a storm in 1996 but 
> this will hit everywhere for about 6 months.
>
> On Oct 31, 2011 1:17 PM, "arxaaron" <arxaaron at gmail.com 
> <mailto:arxaaron at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     On 2011/10/31, at 10:38 , Rich Faulkner wrote:
>
>     > Don't know if any of you have been following this but the
>     > flooding in Thailand has shutdown manufacturing of a
>     > significant part of the HDD industry.  I'm seeing price spikes
>     > on HDD's and indications are it's going to get worse.
>     >   Street talk is that it may be May or June before Western
>     > Digital recovers from the losses due to flooding:
>     >
>     >
>     http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/miscellaneous/thailand-floods-to-significant-impact-wd
>     > Thailand Floods to Significantly Impact HDD Industry
>     >
>     > Prices in some cases have doubled already.  If you need
>     > drives you better grab them before they're either gone or
>     > too expensive to purchase...
>     >
>     > Rich in Lilburn
>
>     Smells like a huge case of fear monger marketing to me
>     (corporape amuika at it's shiny best...)
>
>     The profiteering prices will only be gouging the gullible
>     people who panic.  The smart money will just wait it out
>     go back to buying hard drives after the fear inflated bubble
>     has popped.
>
>     peace
>     aaron
>
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Ale mailing list
>     Ale at ale.org <mailto:Ale at ale.org>
>     http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>     See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>     http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20111031/0b716a0e/attachment-0001.html