The catastrophic flooding in Thailand has lead to some high tech firms in the U.S. warning that production of critical components for computers and other technology such as hard drives (HDD) will be reduced. For now, the industry hasn't really felt the pinch of the HDD shortage resulting from closed factories in Thailand.
 
It might seem like the only firms that will be hard hit in the tech sector by the flooding will be HDD makers like Seagate, Western Digital, and computer manufacturers that need the HDDs for data storage. Several other industries will be hard hit though.
 
The New York Times points out that any industry where storage is important to growth will be affected. That includes massively popular websites Facebook and Google.
 
To grow, online properties like Facebook and Google need a tremendous amount of storage space. Companies that run cloud storage services like Apple and Microsoft could be affected as well.
 
Gartner research VP John Monroe said, "You really can’t grow and expand the Internet without the expansion of storage hard drives. There are an awful a lot of ramifying impacts that are being incompletely considered here."
 
The expectation is that 50 million fewer HDDs than normal will ship over the next two quarters. Analysts believe that consumers won't feel the strain of the shortage until 2012.
 
Monroe added, "By the first quarter of next year, all worldwide inventories of hard drives will be sucked dry. This is a crisis of escalating dimension for many I.T. revenue streams."
 
Analysts also say that to keep the price of computers consistent PC makers will have to secure discounts for other components to offset the increased cost of storage. Things like graphics chips and DRAM will have to get cheaper.
 
There are HDD facilities in other countries like China, Malaysia and others, but many of them are operating at 90-98% capacity already.