Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
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.
Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
Shortages usually mean higher prices. And if spinning platters become more expensive, more people will turn to solid state instead.
Yeah, prices only have to go up about a factor of a hundred and that 3TB SSD will finally be competitive with my 3TB HDD.
And cloud servers don't use hard drives?
No, they just send data back and forth, using the Internet as a giant delay line.
If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay, I'd say we're looking at a marketplace price manipulation with a convenient excuse of flooding in Thailand.
The commodity markets use weather as an excuse to try to boink up prices all of the time. Hey Starbucks-- coffee is down 23%-- are you going to drop your recent price hike? Oh, I thought not.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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?
Did all manufacturers get hit by the flood? If not, lawsuits of price fixing might follow if they all start to increase prices for no reason.
Lol. You do realize that a 25% reduction in output means the same demand must be met by fewer manufacturers, right? When demand remains constant and supply suddenly decreases, the natural market reaction is a price increase until demand decreases to match supply (or until supply recovers).
Sure, the other manufacturers may be able to increase supply somewhat to counter this, but prices are bound to increase in the short term. Not due to price fixing, but due to normal market forces.
...is going to wish it had chosen a different name.
(yes, I know that Seagate wasn't listed in TFS)
If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay,...
How long the delay is is pretty independent of the time it takes to get up to speed later. If you give me a snow globe I can break it in a couple seconds... it would take you far longer to fix.
From the second article it sounds like the plants have experienced water damage: "They asked us to speed up draining water from the plants. If it could be done in one to two months, the company expected to then take about four to six months months for repairs."
So... Seagate ate Maxtor (and now they've gone to crap too). WD is KO for the next "six to eight months" (wtf? really?). Who are we supposed to use now? Hitachi? (I'm serious--I've only purchased WD drives since I had two Maxtors crap out on me).
Luckily, I received two new WD 3TB drives just a couple of weeks ago. Most of our drives are WD, and I have resolved yet again never to buy Seagate. I've had good experience with Samsung as well as with WD.
The only drives which died on me at home in the last 20 years years were (i) a brand new 20GB Maxtor drive died on its first power-up about 12-14 years ago and was replaced under warranty, the replacement outlasting my use for it, (ii) a several-year-old Seagate 340GB died about 3 years ago while moving house despite not suffering any mechanical shocks, and (iii) a barely 1½-year-old Seagate 2TB which I just removed. The Seagate 2TB was in a pampered location but died suddenly, and its SMART data was covered in lurid red when it was restarted. It claimed to have overheated (the drives above and below it had not), to have too many reported uncorrectable errors, to have reallocated too many sectors, and to have too many uncorrectable sectors. It's past its pathetic warranty period, so I suppose I'll have to replace it (with Samsung if I can't get WD easily).
Other disks were retired over the years due to inadequate capacity, or given away with the PC containing them, but were in perfect working order the last time I had them.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If two inches of snow can shut down your town, you're not living in Canada.
If you dare suggest we use router/switch buffers as "cloud storage", I'm going to stab you over IP.
I remember reading that you could use Shannon's juggling theorem to calculate how much data is stored on the wire at any given time. Instead of balls, hands, and flight time, you're looking at packets, routers, and latency, but the calculation is pretty much the same.
Wish I could find that article.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!