An article in the New York Times (Nov 16, 2011) describes hard drive prices rising from $10 to $25 due the Thai floods, and their impact on Toshiba and Western Digital plants in Thailand. Earlier reports suggested that around 25% of world capacity for hard drives were impacted by the floods and that recovery may take a few months.  But dropping memory prices may prevent PC price increases, at a time when sales in the US are sluggish for Dell. Should Dell increase component inventories to hedge against supply risk? Will delayed hard drive availability hasten the adoption of the cloud based netbooks ? Should Dell move to solid state drives as a product feature change to drive share ?