I think it's a bit optimistic expecting that to be a short-term price increase, most estimates think it'll be into the middle of next year before production capacity is back to where it was. WD expect to only ship a third of the drives they were planning to for this quarter.
Trouble is, they'll be trying very hard to fulfil contracts with the big vendors (Dell, HP, etc) before supply to the smaller resellers, which then goes through to the usual online component suppliers you might buy from as an end user.
You may have missed the boat on external drives - there was a bit of a rush to buy anything at the old prices when all this started, and not much stock is coming through to replenish (that £66 drive is out of stock on tesco direct). If you can find one at a roughly sensible price though, worth going for. Normally they are just plain SATA drives in the enclosures so fine to use in a PC.
I'm glad I picked up some more drives a couple of months ago - a mate bought a new NAS and was about to order 4x 2TB disks to go in it before the prices tripled overnight.