Thanks to the unusual flooding in Thailand that has all but shut down Western Digital manufacturing plants in the region, worldwide pricing on hard drives has started to increase, and increase significantly. An article by CRN on October 21, 2011 (http://www.crn.com/news/storage/231901420/thailand-floods-raise-havoc-on-hard-drive-business-as-customers-scramble-for-supplies.htm) provides additional details about the problem and the impact it’s having on manufacturers and distributors, but that article is now over 10 days old, and prices have already started to increase significantly.

We have noticed from our suppliers that costs for hard drives have started to rise considerably in just the last week. Thus far, we have been able to make good on quotes we have provided for Dell server and desktop systems when those orders have been placed within a few days of creating the quotes, but its possible, even likely, that any systems we quote in the next few weeks are going to have higher pricing thanks to the increase in the cost of hard drives to manufacturers as well as distributors.

Another trend we have seen this week is that many online components resellers, including but not limited to Fry’s and New Egg, have started limiting hard drive sales to one drive per customer, and that’s for those products they show to have in stock. Many of the regular hard drive listings at those resellers are simply not available.

If you have been considering hard drive purchases, or you have been looking to get a new server or desktop configured with a lot of disk space, you’ll probably want to look at making those purchases sooner rather than later to hedge against probable continuing increases in the cost of disk space over the next few months.