Shortage of Hard Drives hurting the pockets of Consumers

 Since the recent disastrous flooding in Thailand, reports of 14,000 factories have been shut down.

Western Digital faced major damages to their factories and has announced a temporary shutdown, bringing panic to the PC industry and is a direct concern to the pricing on consumer PC and Repair. “You’ll start to see PC makers increase prices for some products. So indirectly, consumers will face some higher prices because of higher Hard Disc Drive prices,” said John Rydning, a Vice President of research at IDC.

IDC is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.

The prices for many several types and sizes of drives in both retail stores and online have already begun to skyrocket.

For example, the average price of Western Digital’s 1.5TB Caviar Green series desktop drive has shot up from $162 to $280 over the past five days. The average price of a Toshiba’s 1TB Canvio Basics external drive has gone from $109 to about $115 in the same period.

Coincidentally, Western Digital’s 250GB and 500GB Black Drives have been placed on strict purchase reserve at Retail Stores, while online, vendors are either completely out or have raised prices to weed out large purchases in attempt to keep what little inventory they have in stock until they are notified of a restock date by manufacturers. An official restock date has not been released yet.

Here’s how we can help:

Given the uncertainty of hard drive availability, we would strongly recommend replacing any desktop/laptop drives that are starting to show signs of failure SOONER rather than LATER and risk having to pay more for a drive. The situation in Thailand, combined with China’s rare earth supply cuts, could impact the price of hard drives causing a huge jump in pricing to a record high in the next three months.

The Team at Orange County Computer^® provides alternative cost effective solutions even during times of disaster.

Before you are faced with an unanticipated disaster, call us now to see how you can prevent Hard Drive failure; implement Offsite Backup to protect your data, and more! You can reach our Tech Repair center via phone @ 949-699-6619, email us @ support@orangecountycomputer.com & and visit our site https://www.orangecountycomputer.com to speak to a LIVE Technician.