hard drives. if you need one, buy it now.
as I mentioned in another thread, the western digital and seagate factories where both 3.5" and 2.5" HDDs are manufactured were almost totally wiped out in last year's tsunami. consequently, hitachi is the only major player left in the game - but their own manufacturing infrastructure is being stretched to the breaking point. there's a huge shortfall in HDDs right now, and prices are reflecting that trend. unfortunately, both western digital and seagate have projected it could take them until early next year to get back to their pre-tsunami production capacity, and with all the other products they're busy making it's unlikely hitachi will be able to meet the demand.
this is a perfect opportunity for solid-state drives. they're still ten to twelve times more expensive byte-for-byte than hard-disk drives and are still nowhere near matching their capacity (you can find one-terabyte SSDs but you'll be lucky to get in under four digits as opposed to a pre-tsunami one-terabyte HDD costing about sixty to seventy bucks). but with no moving parts, a fraction of the weight, far lower power consumption and no noise output, and many times the read/write speeds of HDDs, solid-state drives are definitely a more future-proof technology. if SSD manufacturers are willing to take a chance, drop prices by as little as ten percent, and negotiate better deals with desktop and laptop manufacturers like HP and dell, they stand to not only move lots of volume during the HDD shortage but get their foot in the door and gobble up a sizable chunk of the market share - and keep most of that once the shortage is over.
eventually the hard-disk manufacturers will get back up and running. but by then the market may have changed. what happens if the only people lining up to buy HDDs are PC-building nerds like me? what happens if apple or sony or some other high-end system manufacturer decides to switch to SSDs for their entire line of laptops (apple is already using solid-state drives in a sizable portion of macbook and macbook air models)? as with all commodity shortages, there'll be an initial boom in sales simply because people have been waiting for something to become available that hasn't been for a while, but about the time the factories really start churning out piles of HDDs, there just might be less demand for them than there was before the tsunami. prices might drop significantly below pre-tsunami levels... or it might signal the decline of hard-disk-drive technology altogether. that decline would probably be a long, slow one, but as we've seen with blu-ray and netbook/tablet computing in the last few years, sometimes all a new technology needs is to get a foot in the door in order to start taking over market share.
at any rate, those developments are months or even years off. for now, if you've been watching the prices of hard-disk drives and waiting for them to drop, don't. unless you can wait a year to a year and a half for prices to drop back to an affordable level, scoop up the hard drive you need now, because things are only gonna get worse before they get better.
