Hard disk drive prices are expected to fall by around 10 percent this time next month, according to industry sources speaking to DigiTimes. The price of HDDs has been abnormally high following widespread flooding in Thailand last October, which caused a severe shortage in supply as production lines were destroyed by water damage. Western Digital's factories were directly affected, causing its prices to rise by 47 percent, and a number of suppliers to Seagate were also hit as its CEO Steve Luczo described back in November.

While a return to the pricing of a year ago is unlikely due to rising costs of production, it's still comforting to hear t …

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Today, Western Digital just agreed to give Toshiba the equipment and intellectual property required to build consumer-grade 3.5-inch hard drives, but Toshiba won't be paying in cash. In exchange, the Japanese storage company will give Western Digital a 2.5-inch HDD facility that's been shut down since the Thailand flood disaster late last year. It sounds like a crazy deal, until you remember what's at stake: Western Digital needed to divest part of its 3.5-inch hard drive business in order to satisfy the European Union's conditions for a merger with Hitachi this year.

Since Seagate already bought Samsung's hard drive business, the thought p …

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Seagate released its Q2 2012 (fiscal year) results yesterday, and not surprisingly the company had some statements to make about the effect the Thailand flooding had on its business. The company acknowledged that hard drive shortages will most likely continue throughout the calendar year of 2012, with supply trailing demand by about 150 million units by the end of 2012. From an industry-wide perspective, Seagate said that 119 million drives were shipped overall, short of estimated demand for 175 million drives. These shortages have led to Seagate observing some shifts in how customers order its products - the company is making more long-term …

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Yes, you read that headline right: despite the fact that neither AMD nor Nvidia manufacture a product that requires a magnetic drive, both claim that the hard drive shortages that resulted from the 2011 Thailand flood disaster impacted their ability to sell graphics processors, and ultimately their bottom line. Both AMD CEO Rory Read and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had said last quarter that they didn't expect any impact at all from the floods - "it's really a non-factor," said Huang - but Nvidia just told the world that it may have earned roughly $116 million less revenue than the company originally expected due to the hard drive shortage (as …

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The floods in Thailand certainly had an effect on hard drive supplies and prices, and now Western Digital's earnings report for Q1 2012 attaches some hard numbers to the impact. Although prices rose 47 percent to $69 per unit over last year, WD sold 23.7 million fewer hard drives, a 45 percent drop. Some of that price jump can be attributed to increased manufacturing costs, but most of it went to towards profit with a gross margin increase to 32.5 percent over last year's 19.2. Overall, WD reported $199 million in expenses related to the floods and $2 billion in total revenue, down about half a billion dollars from last year. The company say …

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Intel announced this morning that the company is lowering revenue expectations for the fourth quarter to $13.7 billion. While its estimate was originally pegged at $14.7 billion, the chip maker cites hard drive shortages resulting from Thailand's flooding crisis as the direct cause of the reduced forecast. PC manufacturers are cutting microprocessor inventory and placing less orders in response to the dwindling HDD availability - a disappointing development in a quarter which otherwise is expected to see an uptick in PC sales.

Intel will be holding a conference call in just a bit, and we'll updating with any further developments.

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Although Seagate's factories weren't directly impacted by the huge flooding in Thailand, the company has been affected by the inventory shortages of components crucial to its supply chain. All Things D recently interviewed Seagate CEO Steve Luczo, who assessed the road that lies ahead for the industry: supply shortages will continue until at least late 2012, and the industry may not return to normal until the end of 2013. And while manufacturers are adapting to the shortage by including fewer parts in their drives by using a single higher-density disk with two heads instead of two disks with four heads, Luczo says price increases are inevita …

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