The hard drive mar­ket is react­ing to the heavy floods in Thailand.

Prices for hard dri­ves have jumped by as much as 50 per­cent within one week, mar­ket research firm IHS said. About a quar­ter of all hard dri­ves are man­u­fac­tured in Thai­land and it appears that all major ven­dors are affected in some way.

West­ern Dig­i­tal pre­vi­ously said that it may see a rev­enue decline of about 60 per­cent in the cur­rent quar­ter and told Ger­man pub­li­ca­tion Golem.de that it will be able to pro­duce only 22 to 26 mil­lion dri­ves this quar­ter, instead of the planned 58 mil­lion units. A spokesper­son said that WD “cur­rently waits for the fac­to­ries to dry” to be able to restart its man­u­fac­tur­ing tools. What makes mat­ters worse are the usu­ally thin profit mar­gins in the HDD indus­try, which means that man­u­fac­tur­ers typ­i­cally have only five to seven days of mate­r­ial supply.

A Sea­gate man­ager told CRN India that the com­pany expects and “acute” short­age of dri­ves and that the man­u­fac­turer expects prices to increase. How­ever, there was no infor­ma­tion how sharp this increase can be. Both WD and Sea­gate said that the floods in Thai­land have cre­ated a prob­lem for the indus­try that will take sev­eral quar­ters to resolve.

Thank you to TomsHard­ware & Golum.de for this information!