hard drives

The floods in Thailand last year displaced over 12 million people and left large swathes of the country underwater, including factories that produced a large percentage of the world's hard drives and hard drive components. Western Digital, the hard drive manufacturer most affected by the flooding, has been working to restore production and between their reconstruction efforts in Thailand and new factories coming online in Malaysia, Western Digital expects to restore production to pre-flood levels by September. A number of major tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have pinned the blame for recent weakness in the PC market on hard drive shortages caused by the flooding. Certainly, anyone looking to add storage to their HTPC or home server has seen the effect of the shortages on hard drive prices.

Western Digital expects to rebuild its production capacities to pre-flood levels by September, 2012, the company said this week. The manufacturer aims to repair its two factories in Thailand and bring back its output to normal levels in several months from now. Until then, shortages of hard drives will likely persist.

X-bit Labs

Most of us were pretty quick to blame the recent round of hard drive warranty cuts on the flooding in Thailand, but we can probably blame reduced competition for future negative trends in the hard drive industry. Seagate has officially completed the purchase of Samsung's hard drive business that they began back in April. The Samsung name will not disappear immediately and we can expect to see Samsung exert some influence with their newfound stake in Seagate to push for more hybrid hard drives and increased R&D into SSDs. Unfortunately, we can also expect Western Digital to complete their purchase of Hitachi's hard drive business soon, and then we'll be left with just two major desktop hard drive manufacturers. At least when Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006, there was still hope that Hitachi could rehabilitate the Deskstar brand and that Samsung's growing market presence would prevent a duopoly in the hard drive industry.

Seagate will get a cadre of Samsung managers and employees, and Samsung solid-stage storage for its hybrid drives, too. Meanwhile, Samsung gets a 9.6 percent ownership stake in Seagate, a good bit of cash, and supplies of Seagate hard drives for its computers. 

The Verge

The recent hard drive supply constraints caused by flooding in Thailand have focused attention on a market that had been somewhat overshadowed by much sexier SSDs. SSDs are faster and quieter than hard drives and have come down in price to the point that many computer enthusiasts consider an SSD to be a must-have upgrade. However, one place you will not likely see us recommending SSDs is in a single drive HTPC that is serving DVR duties. If you are interested in capturing some of the performance of an SSD without sacrificing the storage capacity and longevity of a hard drive, then a hybrid drive might be worth considering. Seagate's 500GB Momentus XT drive has been one of the perhaps the most high profile hybrid drive to date and now Seagate is back with their second generation Momentus XT drive in a new 750GB model. The new drive doubles the amount of NAND memory and adjusts the caching to only store read data which should increase longevity in a DVR scenario versus an SSD and most other hybrid drives. Whether the performance benefits are worth the hefty price tag is a whole other issue.

With the second generation Momentus XT we have a hybrid hard drive that has the ability to outperform its predecessor, without really seeing the huge upgrade necessary to fully negate the need for an SSD. To quantify the performance improvement over the previous generation as well as its place in the HDD-SSD continuum, we turn to a mix of application based, trace based and synthetic benchmarks.

Anandtech

Western Digital recently announced that they are ahead of schedule on restoring production to their factories in Thailand damaged by the recent flooding there. Western Digital's Thailand factories are responsible for about 60% of the company's products and the damage done, as well as the damage done to the factories of the other hard drive component manufacturers in the region, have had a major impact on hard drive supplies around the world. Fortunately for Western Digital, the hard drive shortages have not had a negative effect on Western Digital's bottom line as they also announced that they expect quarterly revenue of about $1.8 billion versus the $1.05-$1.25 billion they had projected. Western Digital's rapid progress is good news, particularly for the folks in Thailand affected by the floods, so hopefully things continue to progress well. Any bets that hard drive prices don't fall as fast they have risen when the rest of the factories are restored?

"Much work remains to be done, but we couldn't be more pleased with the effort and results thus far, including tremendous support from our supply partners and customers," said Western Digital CEO John Coyne.

TechSpot