If I need storage now and I can't get flash disks, I will buy mechanical. Production will not ramp up overnight (or at all - there is no point investing in scaling up if I think the situation is only temporary), so an increase in demand inevitably will result in prices going up.
Btw gas goes up when oil goes up not just because it can replace it in some applications, but also because it is often produced and transported in the same areas as oil, by the same companies involved in oil, so it is typically affected in similar ways.
Customer demands (or hoarding) sentiments kept us busy on the production lines of racks with 1K+ drives and I think we've already shipped out more than 5K of them since early last year. No supply constraints on cpu and memory parts due to the way this sku was designed but damn did we have so many defective hdd's; I'd ballpark about 20% from the vendor and 10% from mishandling.
Yeah I have no idea the direct cause. I didn't think that the SATA controllers for a hard drive took that much.
It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.
It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.
Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?