Hard Drive Shortage Coming Soon

[gblowfish]

If you need a hard drive, better think about buying one now before prices go up and stocks go down:

http://tinyurl.com/3n6btep

The humble hard disk drive may become a more precious commodity in the coming months, according to analysts and Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made this very clear this week in the company's earnings conference call, referring to the impact of the floods in Thailand. "Like many others, we source many components from Thailand and have multiple factories that supply these components. There are several factories that are currently not operable, and the recovery timeline for these factories is not known at this point," he said.

Cook continued. "We would say that our primary exposure is on the Mac...I'm virtually certain there will be an overall industry shortage of disk drives as a result of the disaster," he said.

Analysts at DisplaySearch and IHS-iSuppli chimed in this week with warnings too, centered on drive motor maker Nidec, which supplies between 70 percent to 80 percent of the hard disk drive motors. "The floods are expected to limit the hard disk drive motor supply coming from maker Nidec, which has about 80 percent share of the market," Richard Shim of DisplaySearch wrote this week. (Note: iSuppli says 70 percent.)

Nidec is a supplier to all the major hard drive manufacturers, including Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital, wrote Shim.

And there is an impact beyond Nidec because Thailand is a global hub for production, as Apple's Cook pointed out. Hitachi, Toshiba, and Western Digital have HDD plants in Thailand that have curtailed production because of the supply shortage, according to Shim.

Thailand accounts for about 25 percent of worldwide HDD production, according to iSuppli.

But warnings about production aside, what's the bottom line on supply and prices? "Typically, notebook brands carry up to four weeks of hard disk drive inventory to respond to market dynamics and logistics...some brands were leaning towards the lower end of inventory ranges, two to three weeks, for most components," wrote Shim, referring to the fourth quarter.

And in a phone interview on Friday, Shim said that in the short term, prices should not rise, at least not considerably. "In the short term, no. Because most of the brands have several weeks [inventory]. But if it becomes this perfect storm of events where there is a lot of demand and the flooding continues to have an impact, then we could have a problem," he said.

If there's one company to watch, it may be No.1 Western Digital (WDC), according to IHS-iSuppli.

"WDC, the world's largest HDD manufacturer in terms of volume, has 37,000 workers in Thailand, and production in the country accounts for 60 percent of the company's total capacity. WDC in the second quarter made 53.8 million HDDs, giving it a 32 percent share of the global market," said iSuppli.

[DaveNull]

One more reason that next spring's MacBook Pro will probably be solid state only.

[chasedude]

Originally Posted by DaveNull

One more reason that next spring's MacBook Pro will probably be solid state only.

My next upgrade will be solid state, no more HD failures in my future.

[phisherman]

If you think that you won't have HD failures just because you go SSD, well, you may want to rethink that position.

[chasedude]

Originally Posted by phisherman

If you think that you won't have HD failures just because you go SSD, well, you may want to rethink that position.

Yeah I know nothing is 100%, but yet there wont be the many mechanical errors with the older platter HD's. Getting rid of those read/write arms will make quite a difference.

[DaveNull]

If anything, though, backup is even more important with SSD as the forensic recovery options aren't as great/cheap.

We're going to be at a place where having a little home server with a high quality skinny drive pushing things through the network to SSD laptops and whatnot is the best way to go.

[phisherman]

Originally Posted by chasedude

Yeah I know nothing is 100%, but yet there wont be the many mechanical errors with the older platter HD's. Getting rid of those read/write arms will make quite a difference.

Oh, definitely. The less moving parts, the better. I've just seen too many SSD failures at my job to conclude that one is any better than the other, particularly at SSD's current price points.

[chasedude]

Originally Posted by phisherman

Oh, definitely. The less moving parts, the better. I've just seen too many SSD failures at my job to conclude that one is any better than the other, particularly at SSD's current price points.

The price and limited capacity has kept me from jumping right into the new technology. My next upgrade may not be for a year or two so I'm hoping more bugs are eliminated and price drop.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by chasedude

Yeah I know nothing is 100%, but yet there wont be the many mechanical errors with the older platter HD's. Getting rid of those read/write arms will make quite a difference.

Yes, but SSD also comes with its own read/write concerns.

It's important to note that right now, there is considerable variance in the quality of SSD drives. I would highly recommend doing excess research on various models if you're interested in a SSD setup. Don't go cheap. There's lots of cheaper models right now that are essentially garbage and shouldn't be trusted beyond a year. The newer drives provide much more longevity.

There's 2 types of SSD drives available right now, "MLC" and "SLC". MLC drives offer higher capacity, but slower write speeds and a shorter overall lifespan. An SLC drive offers lower capacity, but faster write speeds and a MUCH longer lifespan.

SSD drives are limited to a certain number of "writes" to the drive. Meaning you can only write data to each sector a certain number of times before it will eventually just fail. In most cases, that's not a huge concern. We're talking around 5 years of nonstop "writes" before it would be a concern. And there is some load balancing technology in play as well, where it will preventing writing to the same sector continuously, so as to balance out the wear over the entire drive.

But some of the older MLC drives don't do the load balancing very well, if at all, and they're made with crappy parts.

SSD drives are far from perfect. But they're getting much better.

[DaveNull]

The SSDs they've been putting into the MacBook Airs seem to be holding up well...or at least a year out we haven't seen too many people screaming about failures.

As far as aftermarket goes, I wouldn't buy any SSD from anyone other than Otherworld as those guys are really snobby about what they sell.

[loochy]

Originally Posted by DaveNull

The SSDs they've been putting into the MacBook Airs seem to be holding up well...or at least a year out we haven't seen too many people screaming about failures.

As far as aftermarket goes, I wouldn't buy any SSD from anyone other than Otherworld as those guys are really snobby about what they sell.

[chasedude]

How is the heat concerns on these? Much better than platter HD's?

[Fish]

Originally Posted by DaveNull

The SSDs they've been putting into the MacBook Airs seem to be holding up well...or at least a year out we haven't seen too many people screaming about failures.

As far as aftermarket goes, I wouldn't buy any SSD from anyone other than Otherworld as those guys are really snobby about what they sell.

Otherworld? Never heard of them. I'm not sure what you would mean by them being "snobby" about what they sell. But whatever works for you.

Apple uses MLC SSD drives from both Toshiba and Samsung in their Air models. And there's nothing fancy or proprietary about them. They're the same MLC SSD drives you'd find anywhere else. The Samsung version is rumored to be a little bit faster. But there's no way to tell which version your Air has without booting it up.

[DaveNull]

No real problems with heat on my Air...except when Flash is running but that's the CPU and not the HDD.

[DaveNull]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

Otherworld? Never heard of them. I'm not sure what you would mean by them being "snobby" about what they sell. But whatever works for you.

OWC does a lot of testing of the aftermarket hardware that they sell. If you go with one of their custom builds, they put it through all kinds of stress testing before you get it.

After your laptop is configured by OWC, it is stress-tested under conditions well in excess of most normal use. The CPUs, memory, hard drives and cooling system are run at peak load for hours, exposing nearly any reliability issue or faulty component. Your system must pass the stress test, or it doesn't ship.

All CPU cores are run at peak load, accessing all memory continuously, placing a high heat load on the CPUs, memory, and cooling systems. This procedure ferrets out marginal components. (You'll probably never use the machine that hard on your own.)

Hard drives are filled to near-capacity to force bad blocks to be mapped out ahead of time, and for glitches to reveal themselves. (The drives are then erased to empty after testing, ready for your use).

Hard drives and SSDs are tested to verify that they deliver the expected level of performance.

External drives your order are similarly tested.

My low post count is keeping me from linking, but look around at the mpgprolaptop.com website.