Over the past year the hard drive producers have been hit by a one-two punch
that has them scrambling to find ways to produce enough hard drives to
satisfy demand. Hard drives prices are expected to jump up by 20% or more
over the next week, with no end in sight.
Back in March the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami created massive supply
chain issues. While no hard drive production facilities were directly
effected, several plants that produced key components such as circuit boards
were destroyed. This created spot shortages in the drive business while hard
drive manufacturers had to scramble to work around these issues. It
appeared that the worst was over and that by the end of the year, production
would be back up.
Then this October another natural disaster struck Asia. Thailand has been
hit by massive flooding. Thailand as a country is the second-largest
manufacturer of drives in the world. Western Digital, Hitachi, Seagate,
Toshiba and Samsung all have a significant portion of their production
coming out of Thailand. Thailand has ground to a halt. It could take another
4-6 weeks until the flood waters recede. While most of the finished goods
were pulled out in time, the same can't be said for the facilities
themselves.
Over the past week we have been talking to our drive vendors and the news is
bad, really bad. Hard drives assembly lines are modern marvels, with
automation, robotics and extremely expensive machines working in highly
controlled environments. Some factories are wiped out, others have severe
water damage. Attempts to move equipment and assembly lines to higher
ground resulted in damages that may or may not be repairable. Key parts
suppliers have been hit just as hard, Nidec Corp which makes hard drive
motors had one of their Ayutthaya plant (pictured) swamped under several
feet of water. It's a mess, and some are expecting supply to fall as much
as 35% below forecast - which in this day and age of computerized just in
time manufacturing, equals demand.
How does this effect video editors?
Right in your pocketbook. While there are some supplies of drives already in
the US, we've been told by our vendors across the board to expect major
shortages and higher prices in Q4. How much higher you ask? We don't know
yet, but the impact will be felt initially in lower capacity drives. For us
that means that external RAIDs based on 1TB drives are going to get hit
first. We've had problems getting 2TB G-RAIDs since the summer, we were able
to get 2TB GT062E RAIDs from Glyph, but now that supply has dried up. At
this point we are pulling both Glyph and G-Tech 2TB external RAIDs from our
website - indefinitely.
While it looks like we'll be able to get RAIDs based on 2TB and 3TB drives,
that too will become problematic over the next 4-6 weeks. If you are
planning on purchasing an external RAID solution for your NLE system, do it
NOW! Take advantage of whatever pricing and availability exists in the
market. Prices will move up without notice as supply fails to keep up with
demand.
For the complete blog post http://bit.ly/sMoZCR
Gary
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