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Hard Drive Supply Desimated

Steve Sherrick

Steve Sherrick

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First and foremost, my thoughts go out to the people in the East who have been hammered with natural disasters, the magnitude of the damage that has been done in the past year is beyond words.

The direct effect is starting to be seen here in the US in terms of what that damage has done to the factories. I just tried to buy 8 drives for a RAID at a local reseller and was told I can only buy one hard drive, despite them having 10 in stock. Supply is low, and may get worse. Even New Egg limited me to one drive when I went to purchase online. B&H only allowed 3. Quite amazing. Considering how much the IT and media industries rely on hard drives right now, this is sure to have major impact, at least in the short term. Looks like I will have to piece mail this just to get 8.

Again, my problem is minor compared to what people in Japan and Thailand are going through, so certainly not a complaint, just an observation.

Jeff Kilgroe, if you still have pallets of drives, I may need to ask for your help. :-)
 
I just had the same problem, trying to buy drives from OWC...certain drives are in more limited quantities. A bit ridiculous that they'd let you make a bunch of separate transactions to buy the number of drives you need, but that's a different matter.

I was able to buy 5 Hitachi 7k3000 drives, but only two seagate barricuda xt's. Not crazy about mixing the drives, but now it seems there may not be much of a choice.
 
Our regular supplier has put the price of our favourite 2Tb units up by 300% ... we've scavenged a good few to see us through, but this could get ugly unfortunately :(
 
Steve Sherrick said:
Jeff Kilgroe, if you still have pallets of drives, I may need to ask for your help. :-)
Click to expand...

Hehe... No palettes. But I do have some 1TB and 2TB drives on hand. Just a few of each. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a real shortage or last too long if it does. For now, most of the clamping down and price changes are based on unsubstantiated fear. Most of the restrictions at resellers right now are to keep people from buying up stock in anticipation of a shortage, for the purpose of selling them at huge mark-ups later.

If anything, I see this as a chain of events that may accelerate the adoption and price normalization of SSD media. While hard drives are normally plentiful, there really are not that many facilities in the world that still make them.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Hehe... No palettes. But I do have some 1TB and 2TB drives on hand. Just a few of each. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a real shortage or last too long if it does. For now, most of the clamping down and price changes are based on unsubstantiated fear. Most of the restrictions at resellers right now are to keep people from buying up stock in anticipation of a shortage, for the purpose of selling them at huge mark-ups later.

If anything, I see this as a chain of events that may accelerate the adoption and price normalization of SSD media. While hard drives are normally plentiful, there really are not that many facilities in the world that still make them.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I figured it was somewhat of a preventative measure. I suppose I'll just look at purchasing from multiple vendors or gather up 7 friends one day and buy them at the local reseller who has them for about $30 cheaper than most right now.
 
Maxx Digital is shipping Hard Drives

Maxx Digital is shipping Hard Drives

All
Just to let you know Maxx Digital is shipping Hard Drives and yes the situation has become very bad with the flooding in Thailand. We are assured by most of our Drive suppliers that it will get worse and we are buying drives every day to counter that problem and continue to have supply for our clients. Prices will go up and as you see in many cases the prices can ridiculous. I can assure all of our RED Owners and Users that Maxx Digital will not take advantage of price gouging and even though prices may be substantially higher for the short term we will be fair in passing these prices on to our RED community. I am speaking to Hitachi, Seagate and WD higher ups several times per week and will try and keep everyone posted as the events unfold.
 
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/10/18/thailand-floods-disrupting-hard-disk-produ/1, http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/10/27/thailand-floods-to-cause-hdd-shortages/

The two links above serves as a shot across the bow. I was in Melrose Mac today in LA, they are saying they will runs short of hard drives, and they have had to raise prices in the last 72 hours, and the price hike will not end there. I've already sent emails to clients letting them know to buy now for their upcoming productions, as they could face higher prices and/or drive shortages all together. I just spoke to the owner of a large LA based server farm, he put in (weeks ago) an order for more than a month worth of inventory for bare enterprise drives, he predicts it will get worse before it gets better.
 
Whats the update on this? Is supply going to continue to be restrained, and when will HD prices drop to normal (pre flood levels)?
 
I think we're still in the same situation. Local reseller in Boston is still putting a limit of 1 drive per household. Prices are about 40-60% higher it seems. This sucks for all of us that need them, but at the same time maybe it helps the environment, less stuff to hit the landfill eventually. Okay, I know that's a stretch just trying to find some positives in this which I was having a real hard time doing the other day when I really needed them.
 
My feeling is this is going to be the new normal as extreme weather events become more and more frequent. We still, as a species, are by and large not seeing that climate extreming is only going to get worse and that our energy and food technologies are a contributing factor. Probably pretty major ones. And as a nation can't seem to find a way to curb our thirst for the easy convenience of carbon.

Simultaneously oil speculation is ramping up the price again -- another double edged sword.

Astonishing how hard-drive dependent the world has become in a decade. And my own life sitting on a spinning disk of media. And every shot on a Red needing drive space -- or at least tape space. (I wish I had an LTO drive system.) Anyway, a reminder of how fragile it all is.
 
I had to buy 20 TB a couple of weeks ago for a slew of big jobs. Left it to the last minute since I could always walk down the street and get whatever I needed. Big shock to find the situation. Was close but I found a supplier in the next State and got the drives for about 10% above what I normally pay. Guess I should consider myself lucky!
 
Most of the pricing out there is just an act of gouging the customer at this point. There's obviously a shortage and manufacturing has stopped for the time being due to the floods. Due to the situation, there has been a run on hard drives -- not all manufacturers or models are affected either, but whatever. The dealers who are marking up prices to 2X or 3X normal are just gouging customers at the moment. Distributors are clamping down and limiting quantities and prices on that end have gone up about 10% on average. Up to 20% on the most effected models. So, if you need drives, shop around a bit.

The bigger PC vendors -- Dell, Apple, HP, Asus, etc.. have not raised HDD prices yet. or not as of a few days ago. They also build fluctuations and volatility into their pricing and have pricing contracts with manufacturers and distributors that cover such things like this.

Seagate and WD both have manufacturing facilities that outside of the affected areas that can make these drives if needed. They will shift gears if necessary, but right now it doesn't seem like they're expecting a need to do this. But looking at prices to end users on the open market, it's easy to see where fear can be a powerful force. WD Caviar Green 1TB HDD's are up to $178 at a handful of vendors today. That's nearly a $100 increase in the past 2 weeks. And yet, where's the fire? Everyone has them in stock... One of my distributors has palettes of them.

Neither WD nor Seagate have raised prices themselves. This is all on the retail end of the chain... Just sayin' Typical twitchy wholesale mentality. "Oh, we might not be able to order them next week... I guess we should triple the price since customers will get desperate and will eventually have to pay it! Muahahahaaaa!"
 
I'm hoping they'll only play that game so long. Hard drives aren't like gasoline. Most people still rely on gasoline in their daily lives, and it's harder to boycott because you need to get around. Hard drives are things that the average Joe will just hold off on to see if prices drop. And if they don't he may wait a little longer. Those of us who rely on them for our work are a significant market share, but I'm sure the retailers would love to have all of the average Joe's buying them too. So, I don't see this lasting a long time if in fact this is mostly just price gauging.

I was geting too used to 1TB drives going for $59-$69. :-)
 
Yeah always our tough first with those effected by any tragedy, then to us!!

Been looking in to getting Back Storage for our Big Dubai Job, need about 20+TB of Back Up Safe Storage for on Set Back Up, + an other 20+TB Back UP Unit to dump the
entirety of the shoot to then take with to the Post House, possibly locally, or in LA, or in Wellington NZ.

Looking at the options with MAXX DIGITAL, lets hope for the best... ;)


EDIT:

Ron came thru again and saved my little Italian A... ;)

He was able to hook us up with a 24TB EVO 2K Expendo and a S%$#@ Load of little Portable Mini VR FW powered Units... ;)

HUGE THANKS for pulling it off for us Ron!!

http://www.maxxdigital.com/evo-2k-expando.html

http://www.maxxdigital.com/minivr-maxx-digital.html


evo_2k_1.jpg
 

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noahvolek said:
So where exactly can we get drives without being gouged?

Maybe a group buy?
Click to expand...


Working on that right now. I need some 2TB units myself and have some clients hitting me up. Most of the retailers are gouging like crazy, even ones I was hoping wouldn't. I can still get the drives for normal pricing through a couple distributors, but we're looking at a huge purchase. One I usually try to avoid because I'm not in business to re-sell hard drives or other components. Anyway, if we can round up confirmed orders for the better part of 1000 drives of the same type, then I'll order. Otherwise I think many of us are inclined to just sit tight.

FWIW, some of the big box stores have not adjusted their pricing. I bought two 1TB 7200rpm WD Black 6Gbps drives at Sam's Club last week for $99.50 each. Which has been "normal" price for them for the past 18 months or so... I know people who are going to BestBuy and other places, picking up external USB drives since they're still selling cheap and just pulling the HDD out of the enclosure.
 
KETCH ROSSi said:
Yeah always our tough first with those effected by any tragedy, then to us!!

Been looking in to getting Back Storage for our Big Dubai Job, need about 20+TB of Back Up Safe Storage for on Set Back Up, + an other 20+TB Back UP Unit to dump the
entirety of the shoot to then take with to the Post House, possibly locally, or in LA, or in Wellington NZ.

Looking at the options with MAXX DIGITAL, lets hope for the best... ;)


EDIT:

Ron came thru again and saved my little Italian A... ;)

He was able to hook us up with a 24TB EVO 2K Expendo and a S%$#@ Load of little Portable Mini VR FW powered Units... ;)

HUGE THANKS for pulling it off for us Ron!!

http://www.maxxdigital.com/evo-2k-expando.html

http://www.maxxdigital.com/minivr-maxx-digital.html


evo_2k_1.jpg
Click to expand...

I bought my 8TB EVO 2K over a year and a 1/2 ago for LESS $ than this! like $2K less- ugh. I was just going to upgrade it to 16TB - NOT anytime soon now
 
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