> I have a feeling that just comparing the numbers without looking at any of the logistics is just a convenient way to dismiss a theory you don't like.
I really have no feelings for this theory either way, I simply don't think it's realistic.
> There's all kinds of things to think about like how 2% may be less than 100% but in an elastic supply of a globally distributed good, 2% of (total yearly) supply called upon all at once can be a _huge_ departure from the norm.
I generally agree with that. However, for one, we're talking about consumer goods within a growing marked - a demand jump of 2% should be within expected deviation and not generate the problems we've seen there.
> Maybe the shortage isn't just a hard disk shortage but a shortage of shipping space to take those hard drives anywhere else but to the NSA.
3,5" hard drives have a volume of ~ 390.000 mm^3. Let's say that's 3.000.000 mm^3 shipped. That would allow ~10.854 drives in a standard container, for a total of 370 (assuming 4 million drives). A large container ship can pack 850,000 containers. So yes, it's a large volume, but for global shipping it's a drop in the bucket.
> Maybe it's that the factory(s) don't make 100% of the drives in an instant and then just distribute them for the rest of the year, but slowly make a constant stream of drives, all of which were swallowed up for a period of time by the massive order, causing the shortage.
Sure they do. But, again: If we're assuming 2% of total drives, it would be the output for one week. Not ideal, but not a major shortage. And that's the worst-case scenario: Orders in the billions of dollars don't usually work in the time frame of one week; it's quite likely that the manufacturers knew of this well in advance and were able to upscale/order accordingly.
> Out of 150 million drives, there might not have been 4 million 3TB drives out there, this was 2014, maybe there was but they didn't want all the exact same drive, if you calculate that some of the drives are 2TB or 1TB the estimated numbers only get larger.
Sure. But 4TB drives and probably 6TB were also available at the time and it's reasonable that for extremely large storage, they'd shoot for larger drives - if only for space and heat efficiency. There surely were a few smaller drives as cache etc. here and there, but I'd presume the lions share to be large drives.
> I think it's totally reasonable that a single order of 12,000,000TB to a single location in Utah could grind the widespread consumer market to a halt for a bit,
I won't disagree with that it surely did impact the market a bit, but I highly doubt it was a major cause for the shortage. Especially when there's a perfectly fine explanation of a tsunami hitting where most drives are manufactured.
> especially if they're almost all made in one place, which it seems most of this discussion is taking for granted.
Most likely they'd order from multiple manufacturers, alone for capacity and failure probability reasons. In fact, if they actually ordered in one place, you could easily get evidence for this theory by showing the problems originating from one specific manufacturer.
> It looks like you've picked only the most favorable statistics and ignored everything else in formulating your opinion/response.
I highly disagree with that. I picked the largest estimate of the data center size and the capacity commonly available to consumers at the time; additionally, I only used a (low!) estimate for the size of the consumer market and completely disregarded the enterprise one. If anything, I probably overestimated the impact.
A said above, the massive buying surely did not help the shortage and I dislike the NSA as much as the next guy. But unless my estimation is off by an order of magnitude the numbers simply don't add up - even assuming the ordered with a delivery date of yesterday! - and given that there's a very reasonable alternative explanation for the shortage, I don't think this is a sound theory.