UPDATE! Shortage of Hard Drives

By: Joseph F. Kovar CRN

Western Digital late Thursday night said that the rebooting of its Thailand hard drive manufacturing (in the wake of devastating floods in that country), has commenced earlier than expected.

However, Western Digital echoed rival Seagate’s warning from earlier this week that hard drive supplies will remain constrained through at least the first half of 2012.

The company has also moved manufacturing equipment for sliders, a key hard drive component for hard drives, from that facility for decontamination, and expects slider production there to restart during the first quarter of 2012 at about the same time it plans to open a similar facility in Malaysia.

Other Western Digital facilities in Thailand are still under about two feet of water, and refurbishment will commence after they are pumped dry, which the company estimated will take another 10 days.

Rising prices and supply chain uncertainty from the Thailand flooding have already started to adversely impact the storage industry as a whole.

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