Without question the floods influenced my purchase of hard drives. Before the flood I was price watching the WD 3 TB drive drop down close to my range and - WHAP - the floods hit. Yeah, thousands died and unbelievable suffering but, damn it, I wanted a cheap drive! Since then I've only bought two drives both of which were SSD's one I bought to update and speed up my gaming computer and the other for a build I need for all the file transferring I do. In both cases the SSD's exceeded my expectations and it's mind-blowing to see large transfers done almost "instantly" relatively speaking.
Now I'm again eying the 3 TB drives drop closer to my price so I expect a major "natural" disaster (natural my arse) to foil my saving of a few bucks.