Report: Brace Yourself for a Hard Drive Shortage
Report: Brace Yourself for a Hard Drive Shortage
Posted 06/20/2011 at 9:09am
| by Paul Lilly
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Our storage needs aren't shrinking by any means. Games are getting bigger, our music and movies collection keeps growing, we have media players, NAS boxes, and, well, you get the idea. Despite solid state drives taking over as the sexy boot option, we suspect the market for beefy and affordable hard drives will stick around for a long time yet. That said, if you're in need of more storage, you might be better served by pulling the trigger now rather than waiting until the last minute.
According to news and rumor site DigiTimes, there's a good chance there will be a global shortage of hard drives in the second half of 2011. After the devastating earthquake in Japan earlier this year, both Texas Instruments and Renasas Electronics, two major suppliers of HDD chips, have their Japan factories back up and running at full steam. The reason for the predicted shortage, however, is that they'll need to have their products recertified,and that will serve as a bottleneck in the production process. On top of it all, DigiTimes says hard drive demand typically peaks in the third quarter.
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Silencer
June 20, 2011 at 9:08pm
So good report, there will be a price bump on HDDs. Thank-you!
You know, External Western Digital 1TB USB2.0 Hard Drives are getting dirt cheap. I bet they'll hit $50 soon. I don't know if they can sell all the stock of those, as they're USB2.0. :O)
BluePhoton
June 20, 2011 at 1:54pm
With the idea of putting MAXIMUM in my PC, I just recently passed 20TB of storage on my Windows Home Server (4 internal and 7 external drives). With the price of external 2TB drives dropping sub $100, it has never been a better time...
That is in addition to ~5TB I have in two computers...
I have redundancy built into the system... though I also backup to the cloud... (just a small % of the data). Fun stuff!
wolfing
June 20, 2011 at 11:04am
I have a 1TB drive, used maybe 30% of it, and a 64GB SSD (Windows drive and frequently used apps), used about 50% of it. I've had it for like 2 years already (the 1TB one), and it isn't that much more filled than a year ago. With most everything I use in the cloud now (Netflix, Office, etc), I don't see the need for expanding storage.
JohnP
June 20, 2011 at 9:48am
Heh. I have 6 2TB Samsung Spinpoint drives sitting on my desk still in their shipping containers. I am all set for a while!
Fecal Face
June 20, 2011 at 10:28am
Dang, that's a lot of storage! What do you put in there?
I've got 4 1TB drives in my desktop and they're nowhere near filled :P
JohnP
June 20, 2011 at 4:38pm
All total in my house right now, I have 20TB worth of hard drives! Mostly for streaming movies...
kixofmyg0t
June 20, 2011 at 11:23am
I have 2 250GB drives in my laptop that are about 1/2 full and a 2 TB external with barely anything on it with the exception of backups of my PC's, phone firmware, PSP firmware and PS3 back ups.
My Xoom has 28.26 GB free out of 28.88 GB....
Don't dl torrents=don't need alot of space.
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