Thor Schrock

Just in time for the holiday season the recent Thailand monsoon is threatening the stability of notebook and laptop prices.

Some parts of Thailand received as much as 140% of their seasonal Monsoon rainfall in a matter of hours.  40% of the world's hard drives are produced in Thailand, and the massive flooding conditions are making this spring's Missouri river flooding look like a kiddie pool.  Think Katrina only across an entire country.

Extreme Shortages Coming

Analysts expect hard drives to go into extreme shortage almost immediately.  Western Digital will bear the brunt of the blow.  Company executives are reporting they expect a 60% decline in their sales due to production shortages.  All of their Thailand factories were flooded.

Seagate's factories were spared, but their component supplies were not.

Online retailer Tiger Direct currently has no hard drives at all available for order at any price.  Their competitor, Newegg has remaining inventory thanks in large part to establishing strict quantity limitations of one drive per customer per 48 hour period.

Computer Makers to Run Out of Drives by end of November

Even PC maker Asusteq is reporting that it will run out of desktop and laptop hard drives entirely by the end of November.

This situation is posing a unique challenge for OEM computer makers, including Schrock Innovations.

In fact, Schrock Innovations is incurring strict quantity limitations and lack of availability on many hard drives used in our Modular computers.

In response we have been buying every hard drive we can get our hands on as news pours in that shortages will be with us through at least March of 2012 and as long as December of 2012.