PC sector to suffer a hard-drive famine

This year's glut of memory chips will be followed by a famine of high-end hard disk drives. Supply problems will plague the PC industry until summer next year, a UK distributor has warned.

The shortage may delay the take-up of Windows NT as a desktop operating system running on high-end PCs and servers. The sizes of hard disk drives in shortest supply are 2Gb and 4Gb. Both are common in entry-level servers.

Ed Bateman, product manager for hard drives at distributor Ideal Hardware, said: 'There is a trickle of supply coming from most vendors. It's going through a famine period.'

He said resellers were clamouring for more of the 2Gb and 4Gb drives.

But the shortage was unlikely to push prices up. 'We'd like to get more product. This is a problem which will stop in the first quarter of next year. But price is never really affected by demand.'

Hard-drive manufacturers will therefore not raise the prices of hard drives, even though demand exceeds supply.