[mythtv-users] Hard Disk Prices -- What Happened?

[Simon Hobson]

match at ece.utah.edu wrote:

>Companies don't warehouse much anymore. They use "just-in-time"
>supply chain methods. No materials come in unless they need them that
>day, and finished product goes out immediately.
>
>So, if the factory ceases production, availability of the product
>that factory was making stops, like right now.

True, the supply of disks out of the factory door stops immediately, 
but how do the drives get from Thailand to Europe ? In big steel 
boxes on ships - and they take weeks to arrive. So there are still 
container loads of disks on the water.

If nothing else had changed other than the stopping of production 
then for a few weeks nothing would have happened to supplies here in 
Europe where I am. But the three factors of "panic" buying, 
speculative buying, and as someone pointed out, diversion of supplies 
to key (big) customers have all conspired to accelerate the clearing 
of stocks.

Incidentally, I was told yesterday at work that a project we've been 
discussing with a customer won't be affected. They'd been looking to 
buy a big storage array of mind boggling size - they deal with lots 
of high resolution uncompressed video and can collect a TByte or more 
per day and potentially want to keep a couple of years of active 
projects on-line. We've been talking with them and <big name disk 
manufacturer> about this, and yesterday we got told by the 
distributor that <manufacturer> keeps separate stocks for these 
projects and there are stocks of disks in a separate warehouse 
reserved for this project - plus sufficient spares to deal with 
expected failures.

-- 
Simon Hobson

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