Have you noticed that prices for hard drives have tripled in the last few weeks? Know why?

This past August, rain started falling in northern Thailand. The rains were heavy and didn’t stop for weeks. By Oct. 12, the town of Ayutthaya was under water, but with the help of 1,000 Thai troops, the dikes around the industrial estate were holding. Then, on Oct. 14, after days of relentless runoff, the dikes ruptured and water poured into the industrial estate.

A few companies with relatively light production equipment had the presence of mind to move out of the estate — or onto the upper floors of their buildings. Unfortunately, Western Digital was not one of them; its extremely heavy hard-drive manufacturing equipment was firmly anchored to the ground floor. By Oct. 15, that floor was swimming in four feet of water, sludge, chemicals, and sewage.

That was catastrophic. Western Digital makes about 30 percent of all hard drives in the world, and 60 percent of its drive-manufacturing capacity was now under water. (According to news reports, the main Western Digital plant in Bang Pa-in made mostly 2.5-inch hard drives — primarily for laptops.)

Western Digital was not alone. Toshiba makes more than 10 percent of the world’s hard drives, and the flood shut down half of its total manufacturing capacity. The flood had now taken down roughly 25 percent of the world’s hard-drive production.