#hdd shortage

I have a classmate from high school working for Western Digital in Thailand and have asked for details how the company is really affected and what to expect (apparently, most HDD manufacturers operated in Thailand). In the same note, I have also been monitoring the prices of HDDs in local market. While prices of HDD in most local stores have remained stable so far, I've noticed they're all pushing their inventories to include even the old ones (smaller capacities down to 80GB). However, in some stores, I've noticed prices of 1TB HDDs have increased from under Php4k to about Php5k. The HDD on my Acer Aspire S3 conked out a couple of days ago. This is the first time I've had a laptop HDD crashed on me. With the right screw driver and a spare 2.5" 750GB Western Digital HDD lying around, I thought I could replace it myself. After a couple of hours struggling with the dozen or so screws, I managed to peel off the back cover and removed the damaged HDD. Read more in our articles including "Have HDD prices gone up because of shortage?" and "Replacing the Acer Aspire S3's 7mm Hitachi HDD".