Hard Drive Shortage Could Hurt Cloud Computing
Hard Drive Shortage Could Hurt Cloud Computing
Posted 11/06/2011 at 11:43am
| by Justin Kerr
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The impact of flooding in Thailand on PC inventories going into the holiday has been widely reported, but an obvious connection we’ve been missing has been raised by the New York Times, and it’s an important one. According to interviews conducted by Nick Bilton, cloud computing could grind to a halt early next year as storage prices skyrocket, and supply reaches historic lows. Flooding in the region has shuttered more than 1,000 factories, including several which are responsible for pumping out a significant percentage of the world’s mechanical hard drives.
“You really can’t grow and expand the Internet without the expansion of storage hard drives,” explained John Monroe, research vice president at Gartner. “There are an awful a lot of ramifying impacts that are being incompletely considered here.” Google and Facebook are noted by Monroe as examples of companies that consume an immense amount of data, and the cost of storing it could become exponentially more expensive in the coming months.
It is estimated by analysts that hard drive manufacturers will ship 50 million fewer drives than usual over the next two quarters, and Seagate has suggested it might be even higher. “By the first quarter of next year, all worldwide inventories of hard drives will be sucked dry,” Monroe warned. “This is a crisis of escalating dimension for many I.T. revenue streams.” Monroe said that the impact from the flooding are yet to be felt across the industry.
You could argue that PC makers should transition more aggressively to SSD’s for storage, even though these prices will likely also spike due to increased demand, but datacenters don’t have that luxury. Backup plants in the Philippines, Malaysia, and China won’t be much help either. Almost every facility surveyed is already operating at 90% capacity or more.
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Marthian
November 07, 2011 at 8:40am
Until I can do all this:
play all my games without latency
my family is able to stream netflix on two devices
my brother can download anime
brother playing online gamesALL at the same time at once without lag, Cloud computing's hurt anyways :\
kixofmyg0t
November 07, 2011 at 7:12am
Well I was gonna buy a Trinity based laptop next year before I deploy to afgan....looks like thats not gonna happen now. This is gonna affect alot more than just cloud computing if they expect all supplies to be exhausted by the end of the 1st quarter.....
Let this be a lesson to all the companies.....dont keep EVERYTHING in ONE place....
ez223
November 06, 2011 at 9:21pm
I'm just curious as to who is even gonna buy a hard drive right now, other than business' that must buy them.
I've watched the HDD prices at my favorite online vendor, Newegg, skyrocket over the past 4 weeks. In some cases, certain hard drives have increased in price as much as 400%. The enterprise class HDDs have increased the most. Samsung's F3R was as low as $49.99 after rebate a few months ago. It's regular price was $69.99 for a long time. Now it's $199.99. 3TB drives, in some cases are over $400 now. I seen one that was $299 jumped to $499.
I'd really like to know, is Newegg even selling any hard drives at these prices?
nsvander
November 07, 2011 at 1:23pm
You just have to look hard for deals on drives, I picked up a 2TB Samsung EcoDrive for data storage this weekend it was only $99 at Fry's, I checked on newegg and the same drive was going for 229.99, so there are still deals out there on drives, it just takes a little more leg work. I just wish that I has more cash available, I would have bought like 6 of these, and then put them on ebay for $150.
maxeeemum
November 06, 2011 at 7:58pm
Why would anybody use cloud computing? You just can't trust these services.
So this is just FUD!
knowname
November 06, 2011 at 7:19pm
crap! only cloud I use is steam... this crap better not mess with all my steam games :/
Zoandar
November 06, 2011 at 4:45pm
The one thing of which we will never have a shortage is good reasons to avoid cloud computing in the first place. We've read firsthand right here on MaxPC many potential pitfalls for cloud computing just in the past year. I really wonder just what it will take before people see the lurking dangers. As far as how to cut down on cloud storage requirements I could think of a few things we could eliminate. Like making these comments. :) And half the stuff on Youtube. And most of things like twitter. And taking down the thousands of outdated and no longer supported websites lying on all the servers of the world. Or, find a way to stop all spam email. ;)
Gezzer
November 07, 2011 at 4:03am
I agree with the storage "house cleaning" concept.
I had a site I built, my first one, on my dial up ISP. It was just a bunch of cool sites and programs to check out. One was about MS's virtual world they had way back in the day.
Well long story short, had moved on to broadband and canceled my dial up account when four or five years later I get an e-mail to my hotmail account asking about MS's VW. I was astounded. and told the guy that it had been scrapped a long time ago, plus the site he'd found shouldn't even exsist because it was hosted by my old dial up ISP.
I really wonder after something like that how much data is duplicated or way out of date and could be safely erased. Bet there's tons that lazy IT couldn't be bothered to erase.
Recidivist
November 07, 2011 at 3:44am
I think you may need to look up what cloud computing is; you don't seem to understand it.
Mortal_M
November 06, 2011 at 6:54pm
totally agree, one of the things I'm not looking forward to is the way everything seems to be going with cloud storage/computing.
gatorXXX
November 06, 2011 at 2:26pm
Massive power outages and high fuel costs (for generators) will hurt cloud computing too.
I'll stick to keeping my stuff on my person thank you.
Conal_keaney
November 06, 2011 at 1:40pm
Screw cloud computing, it's gonna hurt me! Planning to build a new computer soon.
Mortal_M
November 06, 2011 at 6:52pm
ha ha ha, I was thinking the same as I was thingking about buying some hard drives to increase my storage space.
I really don't want to buy them now, but this has got me thinking.
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