Time to stockpile backup drives?

Companies that produce backup computer drives for businesses are warning of product shortages. But it may not be necessary for business owners to hoard these devices.

Recall those Hollywood disaster movies, where masses of homeowners rush to the store to stockpile bottles of water and boxes of cereal before a storm wipes out an entire town.

Now, picture business owners lining up to grab as many backup hard drives as they possibly can to store precious corporate data. This is the kind of image some tech companies have been trying to conjure up in recent months as they warn of shortages in this market, due to massive flooding in Thailand that they say will disrupt manufacturing operations this year and possibly beyond.

Seagate, which claims to be the number one manufacturer of hard drives and storage solutions worldwide, has been cited in news reports warning about shortages both last year, and this year.

Western Digital, a competitor that sells all kinds of hard drives, sent a release earlier this year through a public relations firm that warned industry shipments of hard drives were "limited" to about 120 million units in the December quarter - well below the demand of 170 million to 180 million units.

The company even invoked a couple of lines from a newspaper article in The Guardian, which noted "if you want an external hard drive, best buy it quickly. Prices are being pushed up rapidly as manufacturers say that they will only be able to meet two-thirds of demand in this quarter, and shortages will continue into 2012 - and possibly beyond."

As true as this may be, business owners, particularly those of smaller ventures, would do themselves much good by searching for more affordable alternatives - namely digital storage solutions online that tap into the so-called cloud computing trend.

Don't know where to begin? Google "cloud storage" - and avoid stockpiling those hard drives, unless you think they'll be a collector's item one day.

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