lulz.
define temporary. its been over a year, a year and a half even?
Insert CuriousDog.jpg here...
It's been around 6 months. The floods occurred in late October 2011.
The price increase has been mostly artificial, anyway, a scheme by the industry to get a breather to recover from the falling prices of platter drives... unfortunately for them, it has a secondary effect of giving SSD makers a chance to consolidate and go mainstream. Combined with the falling SSD prices (thanks to the Sandforce fiasco), many consumers are finding SSDs to be a necessity - and platter drives' main advantage, capacity, is becoming less of an advantage.
People no longer automatically consider making a 1TB or 2TB drive their main drive - for many, a 120GB or 240GB drive will do (and why not? platter drive makers kept the laptop drive "sweet spot" at 80GB for way too long). They take the tradeoff of speed over capacity... and the sweet spot is still around $200~250 for those consumers. It barely affects a system price.
Keeping the prices artificially high might give Seagate and WD a brief respite, but in the long term, it's yet another nail in their coffin. In 5 years, platter drives will be a specialty tech filling a specific niche - cheap storage server farms.