Currently, due to the flooding in South East Asia, there is a significant shortage of disk based hard drives.  This shortage is expected to affect the next two, possibly up to three, business quarters.  Currently prices for hard drives have doubled, and every distributor and retailer has limited supply to one (1) unit per household.  Most of the sales restrictions limit purchase to once a month.  This situation may prove to be the catalyst which shifts the industry away from traditional hard disk drives and onto the newer and much faster SSD (solid state drive) drives.  Prices for SSD’s will most likely become very competitive in relation to hard drives throughout the new year.

One thing to keep in mind is that the prices for hard disk drives had possibly dropped to an artificial low before the flooding, which was created by a surplus of supply in the marketplace.  Prior to the last week of Oct 2011 the cost for a 500GB SATA drive was on average $50.  Current prices have doubled/tripled for these drives.  Current pricing for SSD drives is still higher for comparable data storage capacity, but with the rising cost of hard disk drives, this cost now becomes a feasible alternative when considering the performance of SSD drives compared to traditional hard drives.