What's up with the current shortage of 3tb and 4tb drives?

[xTTTx]

Why is there such an acute shortage of Hitachi 3tb and 4tb hard drives with ETAs as long as 3 months! We are a small cloud storage company trying to buy about 300 of these drives, but major retailers are giving us an ETA of end of Aug. I thought the production lines were back up. Is this an artificial shortage? Are the OEMs and large companies stocking up HDDs? A friend who works for a big Internet company, says there is shortage for them and they are buying these hard drives at a rate of 100s per day directly from the distributors!

Btw I am new user on TomsHardware, so please excuse me if I posted it in the wrong category.

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you believe it... it sucks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/HDD-thailand-floods-prices-drop-expensive-supply-problem,15909.html

 

[garrick]

The floods in Thailand slowed down hard drive production so it still hasn't gotten back to pre flood levels but it's starting to get there. I'm kicking myself for not buying hard drives before the shortage as I could have made a killing reselling 1-2TB hard drives.

 

[xTTTx]

I don't think that's what it is. 1Tb and 2Tb drives are all readily available on most retailer websites. Its just the 3TB and 4TB that have evaporated from the market.

 

[dmourati]

Same problem here.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1171653

Hitachi got bought by Western Digital then sold to Toshiba. Floods are "maybe" part of the equation but so is the SSD trend and the inherent game shift afoot. Good luck.