IMO prices will come down in the channel next quarter. Probably not fast, but they'll come down. They had locked in prices with the likes of Dell and HP via quarterly contracts already when the flood happened, so they were not able to amortize their higher per unit fixed costs with the bulk of their volume. In Q1 2012, they'll be able to bump the prices to the big guys, which even a small increase will reduce the need to completely hose the retail channel prices.
That's why retail prices really spiked so high, it was the only place they could really increase to offset their per unit cost increases. Since it's fairly low volume compared to the drives that go to people they have big contracts with, those prices had to spike pretty high to make up for the lack of increase there.
I'm sure there was a little greed involved too, but the HDD industry cost per unit is also incredibly sensitive to volume. Margins in the HDD industry have always been pretty low and inventory also stays pretty lean compared to something like the memory market, which does make them pretty susceptible to events like this.
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