Don't hold your breath waiting for hard drive prices to stabilize, not unless your lungs are large enough to sustain you for up to 12 months. It's been several months since flooding in Thailand left hard drive manufacturing equipment submerged in water, and as we kick off 2012, Hitachi warns the global hard drive industry won't completely recover until the end of 2012.

A trio of executives at Hitachi and LG will spend some time behind bars for conspiring to rig bids and fix prices for the sale of optical disk drives, the U.S. Department of Justice announced today. Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim, and Sik Hur (aka Daniel Hur) each agreed to plead guilty, with Park and Kim agreeing to serve eight months in prison and Hur agreeing to seven months. All three also agreed to pay $25,000 in criminal fines.

Now is a pretty bad time to be shopping for a mechanical hard drive. Prices are generally higher than what they were a couple of months ago, sometimes significantly so, due to the flooding in Thailand. But it's a temporary problem and eventually the storage sector will settle down. So, onward with innovation, and kudos to Hitachi for coming out with a 4TB internal HDD as part of its Deskstar line.

Now is not the time to buy a mechanical hard drive, not unless you absolutely have to. As you know, the recent flooding in Thailand hit the hard drive industry pretty hard (from a technology standpoint -- obviously the biggest tragedy here is the impact it had on people's lives), and even just a 1TB hard drive is going to set you back about $150 street, almost triple what they selling for prior to the flood. Is the shortage really that bad?