Rumors of hard drive production shortages bubble to the surface

The tech-world rumor mill tends to ceaselessly turn, and this week is no different as its attention gets focused on hard drives, or more specifically -- hard drive production. According to ETNews, a Korean tech blog, increased demand for PMPs and GPS navigators, as well as recent earthquakes in Japan, have led to a price hike in 80GB and 160GB drives due to shortages from the manufacturers. Obviously this story calls for a healthy grain-of-salt attitude, as we've seen no outward sign that there's any significant movement when it comes to hard drive prices (except to say they're steadily shrinking), though according to ETNews, prices jumped 10 percent this month. If you believe the report, domestic demand for drives is expected to be in the region of 13 million units (in Korea, we assume), but current estimates have production falling 1.95 million (or 15 percent) off the mark. Obviously, that kind of slip would have an impact on the manufacturers bottom line, but until there's some hard evidence, we wouldn't recommend selling off your Hitachi stock.

[Via PlayerBites]

[Bernhard @ Aug 13th 2007 10:41PM]

OMG! How am I supposed to back up my 320 GB worth of illegaly downloaded Pornography with rising prices?

[LiQuiD_FuSioN @ Aug 13th 2007 10:44PM]

Crack those whips! Those Chinese people need to work faster! ^,^

[Matt B @ Aug 13th 2007 11:03PM]

I guess my companies web server heard this because it noticed a shortage in it's drives today. Thank god for a back up system that actually worked this time.

[sirnoobius @ Aug 13th 2007 11:10PM]

it's actually "I r shortage'd"

[Dan @ Aug 13th 2007 11:40PM]

Silly you! No illiterate bloggers or gamers use apostrophes.

[Eric @ Aug 13th 2007 11:24PM]

This reminds me of the every-few-years fire at the memory factory in the early 1990s that would spike the price of RAM for a while. Then MS would introduce a DOS improvement with a better EMM386 or whatever and things would settle down.

In this case, they had better be careful spiking the price of hard drives. Wouldn't want to give the flash drives a toehold...

[Ted K @ Aug 13th 2007 11:50PM]

80 and 160gb? If this is 2.5" only will it affect the 3.5s?

[tehpwnmstr @ Aug 14th 2007 12:06AM]

is it can be make hard drive tiem now plz?

[Michael @ Aug 14th 2007 8:56AM]

Sweet...

[jptech @ Aug 14th 2007 2:12AM]

I've been trying for months to buy some new WD 500GB RE2 drives. No retailers have them in stock. WD wants to charge 50% above going rates for the drive. I've been asking if they have shortages. No answers. I think there's a shortage.

[Bam @ Aug 14th 2007 3:07AM]

There's definitely no shortage of idiots, however.

[Arrogance @ Aug 14th 2007 4:09AM]

I can't even wipe my bum with 160GB. File this under who gives a duck.

[mattclarkie @ Aug 14th 2007 10:17AM]

I bought an 80gb HDD a few months ago to run windows of. I keep no files on it, just windows and programs, that way the drive is much faster than running Windows of a 500Gb.

I am surprise by people using 500gb, 700gb boot drives, to me it seems foolish, and as the boot drive is most likely to fail, it is pointless keeping your files on it.

[Ty @ Aug 14th 2007 10:40AM]

Some people only want / can afford one hard drive. Other people download on to a 300 gig OS array and then unpack / unrar to a separate 1.5 TB storage array. Most storage solutions aren't universally smart or stupid ;)

[Joe Shmoe @ Aug 14th 2007 2:52PM]

Generally speaking, higher capacity drives are faster due to a higher bit density on the platter itself. Not to mention greater cache sizes on these drives.

Running your OS off of an 80gb drive should not significantly increase your OS performance over having say, two 250gb drives.