Hard drive manufacturers Seagate Technology and Western Digital have reported great financial results after such a prolonged hard disk drive 'crisis.'

The Thailand flood came and went and we were left with the hard drive 'crisis'. While the hard drives were almost never 'out of stock' the prices increased even by 300%. Months passed by, but there seemed to be no end to the hard drive crisis, despite the fact that both manufacturers were announcing the restoration of the plants affected by the waters. In a report from earlier his year, we found out that Seagate even managed to increase its HDD shipments with around 2% when compared to the previous year. Where exactly was that 'crisis?'

Now Seagate proudly announces it has decided to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repurchase a considerable amount of its outstanding ordinary shares. Spending 2.5 billion dollars less than a year after buying Samsung's HDD division for another 2 billion doesn't really seem like a company 'suffering' from a 'crisis.' Western Digital, too, has just announced its fiscal third quarter financial results. Despite recently acquiring HGST (that's Hitachi's HDD division) in March last year and also �suffering� from a "difficult crisis," they've made a net income of 146 million dollars, or 62 cents per share.