Industry insiders that are have been playing with OEMs and suppliers for more than 20 years and remember the ZX Spectrum pre-PC era, are telling us that the effects of the HDD shortage will last a lot longer than originally expected.

Most analysts believe the market should stabilize in Q1 2012, as output is restored and HDD makers try to catch up on back orders. These memory and retail experts agree that a lot of distributors and shops are playing poker and that they have a lot of HDD drives in stock, but they just want to sell them at higher prices once the shortage becomes even more severe.

It was reported that many vendors and distributors might run out of HDD drives by the end of December that will probably result with further increase of already ridiculously high prices. However, high prices should cool off demand, thus mitigating the effects of the shortage.
On the other hand HDD manufacturers would rather sell 2TB hard drive for €200 rather than for 65 €, the price of the same HDD before the flood.

We cannot stress enough that this is a perfect chance for massive SSD penetration that will take some huge chunks of market in 2012.