What is the impact and future prospects of "flood damage in Thailand" on the situation of hard disk in 2011

ByDVIDSHUB

It occurred in Thailand from July 2011 to the following January and caused a major damageThailand floodAlso influenced the field of electronic equipment. In ThailandWorld's No. 2 hard disk drive producerIt was also remembered that it caused a shortage of global hard disk because it was. The influence that the incident brought about and the situation expected in the future, is an American online storage service providerBackblazeWe are analyzing it.

Backblaze Blog »Farming hard drives: 2 years and $ 1 M later
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/26/farming-hard-drives-2-years-and-1m-later/

BackblazeIs a company that develops software for online backup and data backup and offers a total storage capacity of 50 petabytes. We are constantly running tens of thousands of hard disks, and based on their operating status in the pastHard disk life expectancyAlthough we had analyzed statistically, we conducted a new cost analysis this time.

Price change due to crisis
According to statistics, The GB unit price (the price per gigabyte) of the hard disk which was one million dollars (about 200 million yen at the time) in 1981 is compared to 0.05 dollars (about 5 yen) in 2011 after 30 years It has become cheap enough. Also, you can see that this price change is keeping a constant pace.


However, "hard disk crisis" triggered by major flood damage occurred in Thailand in 2011 caused the pace to collapse. The GB unit price as of September 2011 was $ 0.044 (about 4.4 yen), but the price jumped to around 0.06 dollars (about 6 yen) in extremely short-term condition due to the crisis and until the price returns to the original level It took two years time. Although it is only a difference of 0.02 dollars (about 2 yen), Backblaze which increased by 50 petabytes during that period will have a price difference of 1 million dollars (about 100 million yen), giving it a big blow Become.


The graph summarizing this situation is as follows. The red graph is the GB price of "Status Quo (Present status maintenance)", which is a cost estimate that would have been incurred if you did not change any suppliers after Thailand flood. Purple's "Actual" is the actual cost transition, and the green "Historical" is the expected change in price if hard disk crisis did not occur.


At that time, the main hard disk used by the company was Hitachi's "0S 03230(3 TB) ". Before the crisis occurred, the price as of September 2011 was 130 dollars (about 13,000 yen), but the price soared to 249 dollars (about 25,000 yen) in November two months later . GB unit price increased by 0.08% from 0.044 dollar (about 4.4 yen) to 0.083 (about 8.3 yen), and at the same time it got into a very difficult situation to obtain. In the above table, the cost actually spent by the company is shown in a graph of purple. Hitachi's hard disk has become expensive, so at the companyWestern DigitalWithSeagateWe are changing suppliers to the company. In addition, when it is difficult to obtain bulk goods, there seems to be sometimes a method using mass-sales stores to purchase domestic hard disks and use them for disassembly.

As a result, the company succeeded in reducing the cost increase due to soaring unit price by 610,000 dollars (about 61 million yen).

Future prospects
As mentioned earlier, the GB unit price at the company finally recovered to the level before the crisis. As you can see from the graph below, we can see that the curve of GB unit price of 4 TB hard disk shows almost the same movement as the previous result.


Various factors such as the fact that it took time to relocate the factory or newly constructed and dissemination of the tablet PC decreased the demand for the hard disk like the conventional PC, but the pace of recovery slowed down It is a fact that I got it.

While storage devices like SSDs that do not use physical drives are becoming widespread, we are concerned about what changes will occur in hard disk evolution and unit price reduction.