"Last October, flooding in Thailand took a huge bite out of hard disk drive supplies, taking out about a quarter of the world's HDD manufacturing capacity. The impact of that disaster has passed, and supply levels are back to near where they were before last October's disaster.

"In Windows 8 it looks like the ChkDsk utility will get a revamp to speed it up. Microsoft also tweaked NTFS, the Windows OS file system so that the NTFS "health model" conceived the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either well or damaged, and took the machine completely offline and made unavailable to the end user while ChkDsk ran. In Windows 8, however, the NTFS scans for problems in the background while the system remains online, and an initial attempt to fix problems on-the-fly."

"Graphics card makers tell us that the HDD shortage has already upset the rest of the upgrade market, and they expect to be affected by it, at least slightly. Most PC DIY guys who waited to upgrade their machines tend to swap hard drives quite often, but once again, since 28nm graphics are delayed, a lot of them are now stuck waiting for new Radeon HD 7000 and Geforce 600 series to do the final upgrade."

"The widespread flooding in Thailand that disrupted operations at hard disk drive factories will lead to significantly declining PC shipments, say market analysts. Thailand accounted for 40 to 45 percent of worldwide HDD production in the first half of 2011, but flooding has impacted more than a dozen factories, according to IDC..."

"Western Digital is expected to lose about 80 billion baht ($2.6 billion) in exports of hard disk drives from two plants in Thailand that have been forced to close because of floods, the country's industry minister said on Tuesday Wannarat Channukul told reporters after a meeting with executives of Western Digital that its exports last year from the plants were worth about 200 billion baht."