The shortage was caused by an interruption of production at the three wafer plants of Texas Instruments (TI) in Japan, which were damaged by the recent earthquake. TI will not be able to resume shipments from Japan until September, the sources noted.
TI and STMicroelectronics are the major suppliers for HDD motors to a number of HDD makers including Western Digital and Seagate.
HDD OEM pricing to increase by 5-10 percent
Posted on Friday, April 01 2011 @ 21:09 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Prices of computer components are going up, DigiTimes reports OEM pricing of HDDs is set to rise by 5-10 percent in Q2 2011 due to a shortage of controller chips for motors used in hard disk drives.