hdd

Hewlett-Packard has a line of products ready to go for Windows 8, CEO Meg Whitman said today during the company's earnings conference call.

"We have a product line lined up in PSG (Personal Systems Group) on Windows on X86. We believe we're going to be well-positioned for holiday on Windows 8 X86," she said. X86 refers to the chip design that Intel and Advanced Micro Devices use.

Whitman made no mention of ARM, the other chip technology that Windows 8 will run on.

"The better Windows 8 is, the better off we are," she … Read more

Hard disk drive supplier Seagate Technology provided a financial update today, reiterating that demand for HDD units will exceed supply in 2012 in the wake of flooding last year in Thailand.

Seagate updated its financial outlook for fiscal second quarter 2012 on Wednesday afternoon, stating it shipped approximately 47 million disk drives, which included approximately 700,000 Samsung disk drives.

Revenue is expected to be between $3.1 billion and $3.2 billion, the company said. Analysts had projected revenue of $2.79 billion on average, according to Bloomberg. Seagate completed the acquisition of Samsung's hard disk drive business … Read more

Intel's market-moving statement today that it expects a fourth-quarter revenue shortfall of roughly $1 billion has crystallized the impact of the hard disk drive shortage. So how bad is it?

A report last week from IHS-iSuppli said it's pretty bad--a preview of what Intel said today. That is, the flooding in Thailand will hit PC shipments in the first quarter. iSuppli says the shortfall will be about 3.8 million PCs.

And it will knock down PC numbers for the whole year. Global PC shipments for the whole of 2012 are now expected to expand by only 6.… Read more

Hard disk giant Western Digital said today that it has partially restored production at a facility that had been shut down because of the flooding in Thailand.

The world's largest HDD manufacturer in terms of volume, Western Digital was one of the hardest hit by the flooding. The company has 37,000 workers in Thailand, and production in the country accounts for 60 percent of the company's total capacity, according to IHS-iSuppli.

WD restarted production of hard drives this week in one of its buildings in Bang Pa-in, Thailand, one week ahead of internal schedules, the company said. … Read more

Micron Technology said today that demand is increasing for solid-state drives in the wake of the flooding in Thailand.

Since late summer, the prices of traditional spinning hard disk drives have been steadily rising because of shortages due to flooding in Thailand. That country accounts for about 70 percent of global hard drive-related production. And recently Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said that large customers are calling HP because they can't get drives.

Micron Technology, one of the largest flash memory chip manufacturers in the world, told CNET today that the solid-state drive industry has seen orders spike.

"Clearly … Read more

After Hewlett-Packard reported earnings today, CEO Meg Whitman said that the Googles and Facebooks of the world are coming to HP to get servers because of the dearth of hard disk drives.

Whitman was responding to a question from an analyst during today's earnings conference call about companies like Google and Facebook building their own servers and not getting them from the traditional sources--PC makers like HP and Dell.

"We hear all the time that people are building their own servers. There are a few...that are building their own servers," she said.

Whitman continued. "[But] … Read more

Wondering how high hard disk drive prices are rising because of the flooding in Thailand? Computer retailer Newegg offers a quick way to track HDD pricing.

For example, a search on a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM, model ST31000524AS drive shows that the price jumped to $149.99 from $49.99 a couple of weeks ago.

(And that same drive is $179.99 at major reseller CDW. And see Nextag price history of drive here.)

Or check out a Western Digital 1TB 7200 RPM, model RE4 WD1003FBYX. That drive jumped in the same time frame to $249.99 from $107.… Read more

The fallout of the hard-disk drive shortage is now raining down on consumers, according to analysts and resellers.

The most immediate impact is rising prices and falling inventory of standalone drives, in the wake of the flooding in Thailand where roughly half of the world's drives are made. "Prices are going up. We're running out of stock and no longer taking back orders," said a sales representative at PC Connection, a major online reseller.

"We have half the stock we used to have," the sales rep added.

A sales representative at CDW, another major … Read more

The scarcity of hard disk drives will only get worse in the coming weeks and months, according to an analyst at Piper Jaffray.

"We could run out of drives by the end of November," Piper Jaffray analyst Gus Richard said in an interview Tuesday while discussing the shortage in the wake of the severe flooding in Thailand, where roughly half of the world's production of HDDs takes place.

"Availability is really going to tighten up. I'm seeing prices quoted anywhere from up 10 to up 60 percent," he said. And Richard said he is … Read more