BackHard Drive Shortage, SSD Manufacturers smirking?
The natural disaster that struck Thailand and hit the Bang Pa-in Industrial Park sent Hard Drive prices sky-high, and the consumers has already felt the pinch with prices of many hard drives rising more than 100%.
Many news outlets have focused on the effect the flooding have caused on traditional hard drive storage pricing and other computer manufacturers like Dell, Asus, HP, so it is unnecessary for me to repeat the long-term effect of the flooding on the hard drive industry. For me, there is also another interesting aspect to this whole ordeal which is the effect of the flooding on the alternative to the traditional mechanical hard drives — the Solid-State Drives (SSDs).
Although mechanical hard drives still dominate the market in terms as far as price/gigabyte, accessibility, and the low-medium consumer computing market, the recent rapid development of new generations of SSDs have made SSDs a very attractive alternative to mechanical hard drives. The rising popularity of SSD can be hastened even further by the price inflation of the HDD which may see more consumers — especially PC enthusiasts — adopting SSD at a faster pace.
The early SSDs had a few deal-breaking flaws compared to HDD which dragged its adoption rate: relative short Mean-time-between-Failures (MTBF), slow write rate, prohibitive high cost of manufacturing for a decent size (most early SSD used SLC, Single-Level Cell). With the introduction of the now de-facto best SSD controller – SandForce controllers, improvement to the MLC (Multi-level cell) technology lowering overall cost per byte, improved write rate, the SSD has seen a fast adoption of the SSD among the enthusiasts crowd.
While HDD prices have risen over 100% in the past few months, SSD prices on the other hand have fallen by a considerable amount, to the point of almost at a sort of equilibrium with HDD prices. Here is some visual data for comparison:
(courtesy of Camelegg.com which tracks Newegg.com prices)
Compared here is a med-low end hard drive from Seagate to the flagship Vertex3 SSD from OCZ.
As you can see, the prices of HDD and SSD in the last few months has had a very interesting mirror-like effect with HDD sky-rocketing and SSD diving. While HDD is still the best price per byte as far as storage capacity, with its rising prices I can see a lot of consumers will want to hold off on HDD purchases and may even opt to upgrade to SSD. I know many of my colleagues are using at least one or more SSDs in their own PCs and moved all OS installation and performance critical applications onto the SSD which indirectly making room on the HDD for other non-performance critical files. With a decent SSD, many people will see a very considerable decrease in Windows boot time, and file access time (i.e. opening Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.).
With many HDD manufacturers, and industrial experts predicting the HDD shortage won’t ease till at least March/April 2012, and with full recovery taking even longer, it may be a while for HDD to return to its pre-flood cost. All the meanwhile, SSDs will only get cheaper. If the big SSD players (OCZ, Corsair, Intel, etc.) play smart, they’ll not only be able to see short-term increases in sale, and may even boasts the overall market share in the storage battle between HDD, and SSD.
– PitaByte is a guest blogger on the Myriad Supply blogs. He blogs just about everything, mostly technology related.
Update from MyriadSupply
The HDD shortage is real. Many of our partners including Dell has already limited sales of customer kit drives due to the Thailand flooding.
