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:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! by Ruie · 2011-10-18 06:28 · Score: 5, Funny

And cloud servers don't use hard drives?
No, they just send data back and forth, using the Internet as a giant delay line.
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?
Re:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! by TooMuchToDo · 2011-10-18 08:06 · Score: 4, Funny

If you dare suggest we use router/switch buffers as "cloud storage", I'm going to stab you over IP.