nsane.forums Posted November 7, 2011 Share Posted November 7, 2011 The current hard drive shortages due to the flooding in Thailand could affect the infrastructure of the Internet as companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and others could be impacted.We've been reporting for the past few weeks that the massive flooding that the people of Thailand are experiencing is also interfering with the production of PC hard drives. Many companies have shut down their hard drive production facilities and it doesn't look like they will be back up and running for some time. As a result, shortages of hard drives are becoming commonplace and prices of the ones that are available have skyrocketed in the last few weeks.Now a new report in the New York Times speculates that the shortages could pose a severe threat to the entire infrastructure of the Internet itself. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and others depend on large data centers to handle cloud computing services and other tasks. Those data centers depend on hard drives to run their servers and store the massive amounts of data uploaded by users every day. Demand for cloud computing services continues to grow but the recent hard drive shortages could prevent some companies from scaling their services as required.John Monroe, a research vice president at the research firm Gartner, claims that if a company like Facebook cannot get enough hard drives for its data centers, it could affect their user base as a whole. He states, "You really can’t grow and expand the Internet without the expansion of storage hard drives. There are an awful a lot of ramifying impacts that are being incompletely considered here."At the moment, current estimates are that for the next two quarters, 50 million less PC hard drives units will be shipped worldwide, although Monroe claims that all hard drive inventories could be "sucked dry" by the first quarter of 2012. If true, it could pose some very serious problems for the tech industry, and for the world's economy in general. View: Original Article Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speedpedal Posted November 7, 2011 Share Posted November 7, 2011 I guess we could start a new Hard Drive company in the U.S. Might ease the unemployment problems. Unfortunately no one can afford to to work for the low wages the manufacturers are paying overseas. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxhedroom Posted November 8, 2011 Share Posted November 8, 2011 HDD prices have doubled already! I got 2 WD 1.5tb black caviars for $109 ea a few months ago...now they are nearly $240 each!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atasas Posted November 8, 2011 Share Posted November 8, 2011 a bit of a hype, few month down the line it all gonna get to normal or even will change for better as in production/price of SSD'sno panic is needed :smartass: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shought Posted November 8, 2011 Share Posted November 8, 2011 Prices go up, production goes up.Prices go down, production goes down.You can't explain that!-----No, seriously, if a company could produce HDDs for 100 before and now (because of a temporary shortage) gets 200 new 'players' will enter the market and prices will go down again.What nitwit wrote this article... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.