The recent flooding reported in Thailand is definitely going to impact the computer hard drive supply for at least the next six months, with Western Digital reporting that as much as a fifty percent reduction in production.  Western Digital’s main facility is mostly under water, and precision tools and clean rooms do not respond well to large quantities of muddy water.  Since many of the component suppliers for hard drive manufactures are located in the same general area, the entire industry will be affected as companies clean up, purchase new equipment and retool.

What does this mean for the consumer? Because computers are assembled largely in the Pacific Rim nations and work on a “just in time” supply basis, expect greater delays in receiving new machines and higher prices. In fact, be prepared to not be able to get certain size drives at any price.  There have been reports that the supply chain is already starting to increase the price on existing stocks.  The smart money would be to go ahead and purchase a new hard drive now, especially the higher capacity drives, even if you don’t expect to use it for a few months.  The other alternative would be to simply wait out the shortage, as often industries that suffer a supply chain problem over build and create excess product and prices drop accordingly.

The growing push toward cloud computing coupled with the price reductions in solid state drives (SSDs), at least in the 120 to 150 gigabyte range may push some PC laptop vendors to offer SSD drives while marketing cloud solutions to access user data. A lot will hinge on SSD suppliers willingness to cut prices further, possibly in exchange for significant order commitments from laptop OEMs to justify ramping up production.  It is a big gap to consider. A 120 gigabyte SSD drives costs anywhere from $99 to $140 USD.  $70 USD can buy one a top of the line two terabyte SATA drive.  For most users, it is not even a question.  Bear in mind while these are retail prices, the gulf between the respective cost per gigabyte is almost prohibitive.

Unless you don’t have a choice, which is where the PC OEMs are or you see a chance to really gain a foothold in the market, which is the opportunity that the natural disaster in Thailand has created for the SSD makers.

We shall see.

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Hard Drive Shortages Lead to Higher Prices-And SSDs in the Cloud?

Just when you thought the Swiss Army Knife couldn’t get any more useful, Victorinox, makers of the original branded Swiss Army Knife has now added to it’s flagship product the one thing we all need . A fully functional Secure Solid State Drive. Yes that’s right they’re going high tech.

With the usual combination of a small blade, file, screwdriver and scissors it also comes with USB 2.0 connectivity as well as eSATA II connectivity too. Couple that with a 32-bit processor,hardware error correction, secure data encryption, and dynamic power management the SSD offers 2x read speeds and 3x write speeds over your standard USB Flash Drive. There’s also an LCD display on board too telling you how much space is left on your drive.

It comes with bundled software providing a whole array of tools(no pun intended) for full file management like backup management of bookmarks, favourites and documents. It also offers full syncronization between your folders and Outlook plus you can also add password protection too.

There’s several sizes on offer from Victorinox. A 64GB slim and then a 128GB Slim Duo. These are both waterproof and shock-proof and are available in an assortment of colours. There’s also a version dubbed “flight friendly” which sports just the blade and the SSD. How this is flight friendly I don’t know. Sadly there’s no prices or release dates as yet, but expect to pay quite a bit as SSDs aren’t quite as cheap as we’d like them to be.

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Swiss Army Knife just got better

Hagiwara Sys-Com has recently announced it has applied the technology from 2.5-inch solid state drives to smaller 1-inch drives.

They have developed the HDF10P SSD drive which is currently only available in an 8GB capacity however they are planning on releasing a 16GB version.

The company has placed the TrueSSD controller it has developed in-house to the smaller drives, which performs static wear leveling to make the drives last longer by evenly distributing write operations across all cells in the media.

The HFD10P has a PATA interface, and sustained read speeds are set at 39MBps, while write speeds are rated at 25MBps. The smaller form factor of these drives makes them well-suited for use in netbooks and other ultra-portable computing devices.

No word on pricing or release information yet.

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Hagiwara shrinks 2.5-inch SSD tech to 1-inch drives

We have already seen the 1TB SSD OCZ Z Drive, and now Japan based PhotoFast today introduced a similar product called the G-Monster PCIe SSD that offers 256GB, 512GB and 1TB

The G-Monster has 750MB/s reading speed and 700MB/s writing speed

No wording on price just yet though it is expected to be launched in April.

Via akihabaranews

Post from: Mighty Gadget - Gadget and Technology Blog

PhotoFast G-Monster PCIe SSD