This morning, I went to check on prices for a laptop hard disk for a client. Last time I checked, prices were in the 50-110 CHF range for disks ranging in size from 160 GB to 500 GB.

But today, the cheapest I could find was over 120 CHF! 500 GB now goes for about 200 GB or so.

I wrote to the company to inquire what happened.

The answer: floods in Thailand where over 50% of the world's disks are manufactured. 

Eek!

So, if you plan on having a hard disk failure any time soon, wait for the floods to recede and production to ramp up again.