Ask HN: Increased HD failures after Taiwan floods?

Hello,

one of the side-effects of the massive floods in Thailand last October was a shortage in hard drives. HD prices went up as stocks dwindled.

The plants cleaned up and restarted production but such bootstrap events often brings with them elevated failure rates. In electronics manufacturing it normally takes anywhere from 6 months to 2 years before quality is back on track.

According to a Google study(1), HD failures are most notable in the first 3 months of usage.

My question: did you encounter abnormal HD failures in the past months for new drives in your professional/home setups?

Thanks!

(1) http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf