[caption id="attachment_3011" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Thailand Floods"][/caption] After an especially torrential monsoon season, massive flooding in Thailand has destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and left countless factories underwater, including some of the major players in the hard disk drive industry.  What exactly does that mean to someone currently in the market for a new laptop hard drive?  To start with, prices have already spiked in anticipation of what could mean up to a thirty percent drop in HDD production worldwide in the last quarter of 2011, creating a hard drive shortage that is expected to loom over the industry into the early months of 2012.   Considering that roughly forty percent of the world’s hard drives are produced in Thailand, the effects on the industry have been profound; post-disaster, it is estimated that a quarter of the industry’s hard disk drive production has been affected. [caption id="attachment_3013" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Thailand Floods Image"][/caption] The latest price increase does not appear to be a one-time thing.  With several of Thailand’s factories still underwater and experts unsure of how long it could take to restore them to full operability, the hard disk drive industry could see prices continue to rise for months to come.  In preparation for the shortage, drive manufacturers have raised prices by 20-40 percent across the board and in some cases costs have more than doubled their pre-disaster level.  The effects are already being felt by consumers and distributors alike.  In a statement last week John Rydning, Research Vice President for Hard Disk Drives at technology consultant IDC, stated “Amongst all of the PC vendors the pain is going to be felt by everyone – more so by some of the smaller PC vendors than the bigger ones.”  This is an accurate prediction when you consider the volume and accessibility of inventory at major PC vendors versus their smaller counterparts. [caption id="attachment_3019" align="alignleft" width="87" caption="Hard Drive"][/caption] Obviously finding out that the parts you used to pay $70 to replace will now be upwards of $100 is neither exciting nor welcome news to anyone.  All in all though, it could be a lot worse – you could need a hundred new hard drives instead of just the one, or worse still, your house could be under ten feet of water.  So sure, a little complaining is understandable, but keep in mind where a portion of that extra cost is going: to rebuilding the nearly one-third of Thailand currently struggling to keep their heads, homes and businesses above water.