CCTV and PC manufactures are panic buying hard drives today, suddenly, there is a realization that we may be about to see a crisis not seen before in our industry, but why? This is taking place around the world and prices are soaring by as much as 50% as industry is starting to digest the impact of the flooding that has hit the Western digital factory in Thailand.
As these dramatic pictures show, the factory has been devastated and manufacture has been halted. It may be perhaps as long as March next year before full production can resume. It is reported that these are the worst floods ever seen in Thailand. The Thai people have been preparing for weeks for this eventually, huge sand bagging operations have been going on but despite huge efforts, they could no longer hold back the waters.
The irony is that this factory is also the main hub for the manufacture of components used in Seagate hard drives, Western Digitals main competition but also most other hard drives in the world!! It looks like lack of production and supply will dramatically impact on prices, some reports already have reported a 20- 50% increase and bulk buying is impacting on supply.
With this one factory alone responsible for 60 % of Western Digital drives worldwide a real crisis could develop.
The CCTV industry is just one area that will be devastated if hard drives are not readily available, many companies buy in 500 gig machines and upgrade themselves in order to fulfil their customers storage requirements, but soon many DVRs could be supplied with no hard drives at all as the shortage starts to impact across the CCTV industry.
For those who use IP CCTV solutions, they to will struggle to buy servers with the sort of memory they require. So no area in the CCTV industry is safe. All of a sudden it seems that having such a small number of suppliers for such a crucial component that seems to dominate many parts of our lives is going to impact us all.
