Thailand flood and Vaio laptop HDD pricing?

Does anyone have any information about whether the current flooding in Thailand will affect the availability and pricing of hard drives on Sony laptops? Retail prices for 3.5" desktop HDD prices have jumped more than 100%, production constraints are expected until Q1 2012 but some major laptop brands are quoted saying they have enough in stock to last Q4 2011.

Pricing at sonystyle.com seems stable for now; I'm planning to get one by Christmas but I'm still holding out for a post-Thanksgiving sale. If the HDD price might spike, though, I might have to bite the bullet now.

 

I say bite. Everything I have seen and read points to major price increases.

 

Thanks. I'll wait for a bit longer, but the first price increase I see, I'll probably pull the trigger.

 

You shouldn't see any price spike in laptops until late december into mid january. Even then it's looks like a ~$20 increase on average, some of that will be offset by component decreases in other areas.

 

Maximum PC | Hard Drive Prices Expected to Rise Due to Flooding

and

Maximum PC | Toshiba Added To The List Of Flooded Thailand HDD Facilities

 

I'm much closer to this issue than "maximumpc". Believe what you will.

 

Are only HDDs affected? If this reduces the price differential between HDDs and SSDs, it could be a good thing.

Cynical view: they were probably wondering what to do with the HDD manufacturing facilities. Now they get to write them off.

 

Given the huge price and max capacity differentials, I'd say it's definitely not a cynical ploy. There's no way you can build a home media server, or various sort of use cases from a budget PC to a corporate server, without HDDs (sure, you might pair them up with SSDs in corporate data centers).

Plus my first SSD-equipped computer, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, suffered gradual SSD failure after about a year. It's not amusing, going from HDDs when a bad sector is a bad sector, to the sorts of SSD failure where data that the file system stores in other (logical) sectors get damaged when you write once too often somewhere else. It's going to be a *long* time before I use an SSD for anything more than a cache.

Intel's Asia-Pacific director cheerfully predicting Ultrabook sales will go up, thanks to supply-chain problems with HDD-based notebooks, is actually what pushed me over the edge. Just ordered a Vaio SA with the 500GB 7200-rpm drive upgrade (they've not changed their price; it's only a $20 extra over the 5400-rpm version) and a free upgrade to Windows 7 Pro. $999 + $20

 

The early SSDs were rather bad with regard to the number of write cycles spec. Modern SSDs are much better - sure, you get the odd failure, but by and large they are very good and much faster than HDDs.

 

Yup, I'm aware of this - just a case of once bitten, twice shy (and having limited resources ). I was on the verge of trying out SSDs again but the brands I was researching (OCZ and something else) both had worrying issues with firmware-related data losses that I probably want to wait for a bit.

Isn't Sony's disabling of SATA III in the recent S-series BIOSes related to SSD issues?

 

Hmmmmmm. I was just saying that increases ARE coming. He didn't ask when and all that jazz. Fact is, there is gonna be a price increase. And at 37 years old, i consider 2-3 months down the road pretty near future. So, to answer the OP's question again-yes, there will be price increases across the board. Agree??????

 

Alot of thai's can be seen installing their Seagates.

 

From today-10/27/2011



From yesterday



Just saying. Notice the difference in one day. In particular the WD Black and Blue. 20$ in one day??????

 

Economics 101. Demand and supply. Today factor #2 is at fault. Who's to say that they can't start charging more for bags of sand, right this minute..

 

Thanks; since I'm also worried about whether shipments will take longer (Sony's CTO fulfillment time is quite variable at best!), even if the price only goes up by that much I probably don't want to risk a delayed shipment anyway. Having it shipped to a friend and picking it up when visiting for the holidays.

 

Sorry I reread my comment and kind of harsh.

For big OEM's like Sony, they have all the drives they need to cover their holiday sales. The January refresh is where you will see cost increases. Everything is unraveling still, but for 2.5" drives it's a $20-30 hike on most sizes. The bigger issue is 750GB/1GB drives. If you want one, buy it NOW. 640GB and below just be prepared to pay a little ($20-30) more.

 

The thing I'm really worried about is that they are gonna delay our CTO laptops

 

That's my other worry apart from price Which is why I ordered now -- two months before I planned to use it. Never had a significant delay with Sony before --- I've been lucky -- but I remember waiting impatiently for Lenovo's high-res IPS screen for the T61; in the end I gave up and ordered one with the standard resolution (ugh).

 

Well I think it already happened to me, my order got cancelled

 

wrong section

 

Sorry if that's the case, but why? This affects other brands too, sure, but I'm assuming different vendors would be differently affected, and as someone who's getting a Sony laptop I wanted to know what others in the same boat are saying.