It looks like hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers have yet to recover from the damage caused by last year’s monsoon floods in Thailand. Instead of year-on-year prices falling as we’ve come to expect, vendors are asking for higher prices for hard disks at this year’s IT Show.

Whether you’re hunting for Western Digital, Toshiba, or Seagate branded HDDs, prices are generally up across the board. …

Another one of Singapore’s quarterly tech bazaars, Comex 2011, opens its doors today to thousands of bargain hunters eager to cash in on discounts – or perceived discounts – on laptops, headphones, printers, TVs, broadband plans and just about anything tech you can find on the island.

One of the most hotly-awaited deals – HP’s TouchPad – has already been sold out this morning. Only 100 units of each version of the tablet (16GB and 32GB) went on sale today and the queue numbers were snapped up in no time. A queue had formed as early as 4am, according to the good folks from The Straits Times Digital Life.

HP is still selling the tablet from S$118 in the coming days, but you’d have to love queues to get in line for one of these fire sale items.

Meanwhile, here are a few other deals we’d be interested with: …

Seagate was given a bloody brusing at the hands of the dismal economy last year. In Q1 2009, the HDD (hard disk drive) market took a steep nosedive and plunged almost 35 per cent.

It sent the industry into shock, and Seagate was badly affected. Not surprising, since most of the hard disks in the world are made by a few players like Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samasung and Toshiba, of which the first two have the lion’s share.

“Imagine 40 million units wiped out in one quarter,” said Banseng (BS) Teh, sales/marketing VP and managing director of APAC, Seagate at their media update today. “It was the most disasterous quarter for disk drives ever.”

According to him, even during the previous tech recession in 2001 the 31-year old company never saw negative growth — at worst it was almost flat — but the market never shrunk, like it did last year, -1.4 per cent globally in 2009.

…

Hard disk maker Seagate said today that it was closing its Singapore factory and cutting 2,000 jobs in the process, even as the United States appears to be coming out of one of the worst economic slums in decades.

Seagate’s plant at Ang Mo Kio will be closed by the end of next year, as it moves its manufacturing operations to low-cost countries in the region, including China, Thailand and Malaysia, to cut costs amounting to US$40 million a year.

The hard disk maker will keep its Asia headquarters in Singapore, as well as its media operations and an R&D centre in the Republic, according to wire reports.

However, the news of its plant closure will mark yet another sobering chapter for Singapore’s once-stellar electronics manufacturing sector. …