Consumers and personal-computer (PC) makers will soon be able to heave a sigh of relief, as prices of hard disk-drives (HDDs) are expected to come down after floods in Thailand last year sparked a major price-hike.

HDDs play a major role in the broader PC market, which, in turn, affect customers and the profit margins of small and medium enterprises.

“In a nutshell, the demand-supply relationship is finally normalising. I can safely say that it is not as big a problem as it was back then. The floods happened a year ago, and then there was a big spike in the beginning of 2012. With the normalisation underway, there will now be equilibrium back in the drive industry,” said, Steve Leonard, Office of the Chairman, EMC Corporation, in an interaction with The Hindu at ‘The human face of big data mission control’ event here on Tuesday.

Last October, severe floods took a huge bite out of the global HDD supply as Thailand accounted for close to a quarter of the world’s HDD manufacturing capacity, causing a 500GB hard-drive in India to rise from Rs.2,000 -2, 500 to Rs.4,000-4,500 within a span of two months.

EMC, which is a U.S.-based data-storage provider, is a major buyer of hard-disk drives and works with suppliers of different types of drives. “We have re-built back those supply-chains to manage the issue, and can see the balance restoring and the gap narrowing much more dramatically now,” Mr. Leonard said, while refusing to give a timeline on when prices would return to pre-flood levels. The company’s India revenue was Rs.1,766 crore last fiscal, according to Dataquest Top 20 Issue. It also recently released a case management solution aimed at government departments and public sector companies, the Saksham eGov project.

(The correspondent is in Singapore at the invitation of EMC Corporation)