OWC Offers Solutions to Growing Hard Drive Shortage

(Auszug aus der Pressemitteilung)

November 7, 2011, Woodstock, IL – The record flooding conditions in Thailand

have significantly impacted Hard Disk Drive (HDD) manufacturing and supplies
around the world. One drive manufacturer, Western Digital, is completely under
water—resulting in approximately 32,400,000 fewer drives expected to be produced
in the fourth quarter alone. Compounding this crisis is the fact that Nidec,
the manufacturer of the motors used by nearly every hard drive manufacturer,
is also having to completely shut down. Thus, a critical component is no longer
available to other HDD manufacturers.

These events, as well as the already lean inventories, have contributed to a
global shortage of hard drives–and even unavailability of certain models–that
will likely last well into 2012.

Larry O’Connor, founder/CEO of Other World Computing (OWC®) http://www.macsales.com,
said his firm has been taking aggressive steps to ensure OWC is able to offer
the widest variety of drive capacities at competitive prices. He also suggested
that a cost-effective solution to this shortage for computer users is something
they already own.

“About eighty million hard drives have been produced over the past decade and
many of them are sitting unused in a forgotten computer, broken computer or tucked
away in a drawer after being replaced by a bigger and/or faster drive,” O’Connor
noted. “It’s like getting a hard drive for free … you can reclaim Gigabytes
of data storage/backup capacity by reusing that old drive as a new external solution
via the NewerTech Voyager Drive Dock or USB Universal Drive Adapter.”

OWC offers two plug-and-play solutions that can give consumers access up to 3TB
for the capacity they need until this shortage is resolved:

• Newer Technology Voyager Drive Dock: Boot and swap 2.5″ and 3.5″ SATA drives
  at will. Models with USB-only and FireWire interfaces offer the fastest connection
  to Macs and PCs. Priced starting from $34.99.

• Newer Technology SuperSpeed USB 3.0/2.0 Universal Drive Adapter: connects any
  2.5″, 3.5″ or 5.25″ IDE/ATA or SATA drive via USB 3.0/2.0 interface. $29.97

OWC also offers external enclosures should a consumer desire a more permanent
and protective use of a drive. Many OWC enclosures are stackable and daisy-chainable
to offer storage for multiple drives in the desk space of a single one.