Flooding Takes Major Hard Drive Plant Offline; Shortages Predicted

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday October 18, 2011 @05:55AM from the just-when-i-needed-new-drives dept.

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."

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Re:Fascinating Risk Analysis Decision by Anonymous Coward · 2011-10-18 06:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

Unfortunately these kinds of plants consume massive amounts of water so they need to be in areas where these things happen.
If its not floods its tornados, earthquakes, volcanos or wars.
Nowhere is safe so most businesses just go with where is cheap.
Dont worry, insurance will cover some of the losses, massive price increases until long after supply has resumed will ensure
the shareholders dont suffer.
Re:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! by volsung · 2011-10-18 06:34 · Score: 4, Interesting

I have often wondered what the total amount of temporary packet storage in the world's routers is.... How much data can actually be in transit at any given time?