Thursday, October 15, 2009

Storage update: Shortages infiltrate the market

USA: Here's Converge Market Insights' update on storage for this month.

3.5" drives
While higher-capacity 3.5" HDD direct pricing continues to slide, Converge is tracking a growing number of part number–specific shortages, with spot market pricing rising accordingly.

These opposing trends lead us to believe that there will be stabilization in contract pricing in the near term while manufacturers increase production to meet demand. Most reports suggest that this will be the case for the remainder of 2009.

This is specific to the 500GB through 1TB SATA HDDs. Meanwhile, we are seeing a slight uptick in open-market pricing in the 80GB thru 250GB IDE and SATA interface drives, with the 400GB capacity unchanged month over month.

2.5" drives
There is little change to report in the 2.5" storage market since last month. We still are experiencing strong production demand, as is typical for the fall manufacturing cycle year over year.

Most of the spot market activity is centered on cost-savings opportunities for volume purchases in the 160GB to 500GB SATA 5400, RPM HDDs. The more sought-after brands appear to be Western Digital and Fujitsu.

Meanwhile, service activity is centered on the Toshiba and Fujitsu brands. This appears to be reflective of changes in market share reported amongst the major HDD manufacturers for this market segment.

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