Bangalore: Net App a storage company officially announced that it would jack up prices for hard disk drives (HDD).  The prices would probably be raised between 5 to 15 percent. This change in price would come in effect from February 6, 2012.

Thailand floods that occurred last year in August has had the major impact on supply shortage of HDDs and eventually the reason behind the cost escalation. Thailand is considered as the major hub for hard disk drive manufacturing and since the natural disaster has put one-third of the country under water there would be significant slowdown in manufacturing process limiting the HDD production and supply to vendors. This is situation  is said to prolong through first six months of 2012.

"NetApp empathizes with the people of Thailand as they work to recover from the tragic flooding. We work closely with our hard disk drive suppliers to stay abreast of their recovery efforts and to secure supply to meet our needs. However, similar to other vendors we have seen a negative impact to our drive costs. While we initially absorbed the cost increases to protect our partners and customers, we are no longer able to do so" the company said in a statement.

As per an article by pcworld.com “According to Dynamite Data, the top 50 hard drives on sites such as Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com, leaped in price by 50% to 150% after the flooding”. NetApp is the latest vendor to hike disk drive prices in line with EMC, HP and Lenovo.