You sometimes raise your eyebrowse to the validity of things like these, wouldn't manufacturers try and keep prices inflated as high as possible for a ling timeframe ? Anyway, the recent severe flooding in Thailand has raised havoc with the hard disk drive supply chain with manufacturer Western Digital being the hardest hit.

The situation was so dire that last month analysts were predicting the situation would last well into 2012. Now, analysts at research firm IDC are pushing that out into 2013. While the worst of the situation is expected to ease up after February 2012, things are now predicted to return to normal sometime in 2013. Lenovo is now informing its corporate customers it is out of 7,200-rpm drives and will be forced to begin substituting alternative models such as 5,400-rpm drives.

It is estimated that Western Digital lost an estimated 75% of its production capacity due to the flooding. Some of the flooded production facilities have been drained and are starting to come back online with others, mostly in the south of Thailand, are still underwater.