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Flooding Takes Major Hard Drive Plant Offline; Shortages Predicted
snydeq writes "Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline, InfoWorld reports. 'Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand — notably including the largest Western Digital plant — were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online.' Toshiba's Thailand plants have also been affected, as have key disk component suppliers, including Nidec and Hutchinson Technologies."
Try to order some WD RE drives and just hope that they are in stock, or better yet email the seller in advance.
I thought with offshoring everything you wouldn't run into these problems.
you're SOL when the specialist is out of commission.
It's sort of fascinating how, despite all our technology, we still suffer from such problems. It seems we may have crossed beyond the point where gained efficiency from specialization has more total cost than slightly less efficient, more flexible (less specialized) industries. In this case the "specialist" is geographical rather than talent, but I think the concept applies well enough.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
El Reg reported this four days ago. No, wait, they reported it six days ago.
Giant planning failure!
I can't wait to hear who decided to put the largest HD assembly operation in a flood plain where Asian Monsoons routinely flood out large areas every year.
It is not like this is unexpected.
Restart the plant and...it happens next year or the year thereafter.
Need more be said. Hard drives are so last year.
I tole 'em they shudna moved them faktrees outa tornader alley.
Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
Dumbasses.
Shortages usually mean higher prices. And if spinning platters become more expensive, more people will turn to solid state instead.
Seems like WD and mother nature just handed the flash memory makers a big win.
Great. Another industry that can blame massive price increases on some sort of natural disaster or political instability, and conveniently leave prices there when the danger has passed.
How long do you think it will take for prices to come back down once all of these plants are repaired or replaced? Will they ever come down? Southeast asian semi-conductor manufacturing is already rife with price-fixing and other grossly anti-competitive practices. Throw in this flooding which, albeit temporarily, provides a real excuse for some short supply and weakened competition and I bet we'll never hear the end of it.
The prices are going to skyrocket. Anyone remember about a decade ago when the earthquake knocked out the memory manufacturers? RAM shot up in price x.x
Good thing I stocked up on HDD this year. Now my dream PC can be built in Feb. =D
"That's right...I said it."
...is going to wish it had chosen a different name.
(yes, I know that Seagate wasn't listed in TFS)
There are a good number of Tech Manufacturing Plants all or partially under water in Thailand.
Nikon makes most of its Consumer DSLR's there and the plant is out of action. With thait other big plant in Sendai still operating at reduced levels after the Tsuami, quite a bit of stock is going to become hard to find.
I live in the middle of the Canadian shield. About the only natural disaster we see is the occasional small tornado. No floods, no earthquakes, no hurricanes. Nothing large-scale.
Looks like they didn't have a back-up plan...
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Good excuse to change to solid state
The great thing about calling it Global Climate Change is that it is anything the speaker wishes it to be. Any condition can be ascribed to it. Any weather phenomenon that makes the news can be included.
It you make your terms generic enough there isn't much that escapes your grasp.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
if they'd used RAID. Basic disaster avoidance planning. Come on, man.
Funny how the modern capitalistic liberal system is reproducing the errors of the soviets.
The predictions haven't changed. They've always said droughts and floods, stronger storms, etc. It's more about global climate redistribution. Places that see very little rain will see a lot more, places with a lot will see a lot less, etc. Imagine deserts suddenly being temperate places and vice versa. The vegetarian, animal life, etc. doesn't follow that quickly, thus a mass die off.
Do you get a clearer picture now or would you rather keep embarrassing yourself?
buildup areas change river flows and food walls just move the flood down the river.
With the failure rates in the new WD drives, having less of them on the market is a good thing...
I thought it was global cooling, then floods, then warming, then droughts, but currently volcanoes?
Whatever. The important thing, of course, is to avoid any effective restriction of corporate air pollution - in order to prevent a free and fair marketplace that would no longer favor entrenched energy interests. If we start allowing innovation and entrepreneurship to overturn anti-humanist aristocracies (like Texas oil barons and media empires) we'll all be no better than Occupy Wall Street terrorists, and you wouldn't want that to happen!
So we need to be sure we keep arguing about symptoms - things like average global temperature, for example - instead of about causes - like air pollution and an economic system rigged to favor dirty energy producers.
good thing I got this sweet 16-bay dual proc 4u chassis virtually full of barely used 1tb seagate n WD hard drives /w 2x8port 3COM SATA cards sittin here
PS fer sale cause im goin east to west coast with the wife mp3sum@aim or mp3sum at gmail dot com, situated in Boston if local makes it easy /plz bump if you feel a woman's pressure to sell tech and make money