In the Fall of 2011, severe flooding hit Thailand, killed 790 people and caused $45 billion in damages. These floods knocked out production at a large number of high-tech manufacturing facilities. Thailand is the second largest manufacturer of hard drives in the world. The impact is just now really starting to be felt in the US. Currently, hard drive prices are running about double where they were last summer. Availability is also starting to be an issue. Many external USB drives are not in stock anywhere in the US. Replacement hard drives from primary manufacturers (like Hewlett Packard) are also in short supply and delivery times are currently running a couple of weeks for warranty replacements. New computer system deliveries are also beginning to be affected.
ASC Group has some stock of server and desktop drives in case critical customer systems suffer a failure. Industry predictions are showing the shortage of drives will run for the first half of 2012.
More information on the floods can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Thailand_floods.
To donate to relief efforts in Thailand http://english.redcross.or.th/home/.
On 1/12/12, ASC was notified that Nexsan will be forced to increase prices on their storage solutions do to the rising costs of hard drives. Up to this time Nexsan has been absording these cost increases without passing the cost along. Orders for arrays placed before 2/1/12 should carry the current price levels.