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ASUS Running Out of Hard Disks
The hard drive crunch continues; reader Thorfinn.au writes "ASUS has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November. 'Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop,' Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters."
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/01/hdd_flooding/
Is this the time for ASUS to bring back the SSD netbook? As I understand it, Xubuntu is smaller than Windows 7 and would more comfortably fit in, say, a 32 GB SSD.
Tablets; all tablets suck balls.
The netbooks of 2007 were perfection.
build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
US workers won't work in a HDD manufacturing mill without getting $15+/hr plus benefits and a labor union to strong arm management. That cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar and minimal benefits and dictatorship rules over every employee.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
However, keeping excess production capacity around, even if it sits idle, means it can be ramped up quickly to take advantage of situations like this.
... and start making those 20 MB harddrives again! If they screw up overseas, you might as well do it yourselves.
-- I sell floppy disks on eBay for $ 20 each.
Mmmm... what we "clearly see here" is not chronic under-supply, but supply disruption by exceptional weather.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Uhh another MBA?
Because it's cheap to have workforce with special education standing around and waiting, keeping equipment maintained and updating manufacturing processes every once in a while?
Keeping idle production capacity around is extremely expensive.
I guess it's time to upgrade to SSD. Imagine how the price will go down if all the demand for HDD goes to SSD. Sure it will spike until production can step up, but in the end it would help a lot.
I picked up a cheap external 2T Seagate drive yesterday at my local discount supermarket, in their specials sections. I guess that they are not aware of the disk shortage, and thus didn't raise the price on it. Now in a computer or electronics store, it is probably a different story. They have "heard" about the shortage, and thus have raised the prices. If everyone keeps talking about the shortage, the prices will continue to rise, despite the supply. For a while, at least.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Because of Black Friday around the corner and other holidays coming up. I tend to buy my large capacity HDDs online due to insanely low prices.
But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Believe it or not, 1/4 of my drives I bought as refurbed and have yet to crap out *knock on wood*, so if you want a cheap large capacity HDD, then a refurb drive might be your only option if their prices do not shoot sky high as the brand new ones...
I might also have better luck scoring a cheap drive locally...
Previewing comments are for sissies!
That would make sense, except the manufacturers of SSDs and the manufacturers of HDDs are completely different companies.
This may be more difficult than you'd imagine.
I doubt we currently have the infrastructure to manufacture the drives, or else some manufacturer would be doing just that and hugely advertising "Hey, we've still got drives!" Considering production of hard drives is only supposed to be down for a year or so, by the time the ones here were ready to go, so would the foreign ones. Domestic can't keep up with cost, and were back to where we started.
Don't worry. With the way the US economy is going Thailand will be outsourcing the jobs back to us. By my grandkids time Brazil and India will outsource to China who will sub-outsources to Thailand who will outsource back to the US where it will be boycotted for not being a US made good, but some foreign Brazilian product.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
Lemme guess, you don't?
Nah, but when I was 12 I got kicked in the head by a horse, which I figure is pretty much the same thing.
Keeping those old hard drives is going to pay off. Must have two file cabinets full of drives from my users. I am going to get them on Ebay and make a mint. For security we had to drill holes in the things. Anyone know how to fill in the holes?
A quick look at prisjakt.nu (a Swedish price comparison site) shows that prices on all models currently in the 'sweet spot' have risen by around 20% over the last two weeks!
Probably the clearest indicator that the shortage is real.
Putting crap in would be an improvement over Seagate.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
US workers won't work in a HDD manufacturing mill without getting $15+/hr plus benefits...
My god! $30K/year and health insurance? What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
When Microsoft was first getting started, they knew they wouldn't make enough money just from the profits of their operating system. Everybody knows people pirate Windows. So they had to get creative. A guy named Chris Liddel came up with the idea to put a folder called "system32" in the Windows folder that literally slows down your machine--on purpose. "System32" holds 32 GIGABYTES of deleted files, internet history, uninstalled programs, and other worthless crap that intentionally clogs up your machine. Why did they do it? Because Microsoft owns several PC "cleaning" tools, like TuneUp Utilities, Norton Antivirus, etc. More money for them. I'm not cool with that, however. Here's how to outsmart those assholes once and for all. Open notepad:
Type the following text:
Save as "speedup.bat" (select "all files" instead of "text document") .bat file.
Double click the
Reboot, and your PC is twice as fast. (You didn't hear it from me)
Source(s):
My computer is fast.
But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
Slim and none. You don't just grab people off the dole line, put them in an abandoned warehouse and make HDDs. It takes a high tech factory with clean rooms and robotics that will take at least a couple years to build. By the time you got the first HDD rolling off the factory floor, the crisis would long since be over.
P.S. For the person taking a jab at the MBAs, in this I think they would fully in agreement with the engineers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I like how one little country that normally doesn't play a big role in the world, is flooded and suddenly its a big deal. How many of the disk makers have factories located there?
And here I was all set to buy two 2 TB disks.
That's for Thailand alone, they do make 25% of the world's disks. So that 7% drop is significant, but not dire. Other factories can and will kick up production temporarily because of the rising prices.
No, existing factories elsewhere will merely kick production up a bit because of the rising prices. We're talking about 28% of the 25% of disks worldwide that are made in Thailand. This 7% loss isn't the end of the world.
> What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
It won't affect the top 1% at all. The rest of us, on the other hand, will find hard drives much less affordable.
Where's the exception, that's exactly why it's proposed.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I thought pancreatic cancer was killing jobs. (Too soon?)
Not as expensive as getting owned by the Chinese and completely losing our economy, and then exporting the jobs to the lowest bidder every time, causing local disasters in those areas to cause massive problems.
There are enough larger SSDs available that are quite affordable, aren't there?
Any in the same price range as the hard drives that were available just before disaster hit?
Manually removing hotfix uninstallers is maintenance that shouldn't need to be done. After a couple months of active use, the PC should assume that the hotfix is a keeper and recommend its uninstall files for removal in Disk Cleanup.
We keep hearing that the U.S. manufacturing sector is horribly depressed due to competition from foreign firms. There is an oversupply of cheap labor overseas and the U.S. simply can't compete.
But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
No, but seeing as how you made half-assed assumptions about what he said, I'm guessing you do.
Ramping up production doesn't necessarily mean building a new factory. It could instead mean increasing the number of workers at existing factories in order to increase output, particularly if they had already scaled back production due to market influences.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The hard disk industry is extremely competitive - one hard disk is much like another, and there is little customer loyalty. Paying for idle production capacity is generally wasted money, since you need to pay for wages, factories, tooling for the factories etc. The lifetime of an established production line is, at best, a couple of years. Think of all the industrial robots and other custom hardware that is required to build a modern hard disk, and then consider that this equipment needs updating every 12 months or so to keep up with the latest developments and processes. That is why it is too expensive to have idle production capacity in this particular industry.
Whether it is a good idea to export jobs to China in the long term is a separate issue.
build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
No, just re-open the US HDD factories that got mothballed when production shifted to the far east.
All we need is a supply of PCIe ST-506 controllers.
He didn't say U.S. workers were greedy, he said that $15/hour+benefits "cannot compete with conditions overseas where the wages are pennies on the dollar". And he is right. People do not realise how low Chinese wages are. A factory worker gets about $0.50/hr. They work 100 hours a week. They have limited benefits, but sometimes the employment does include housing and food. They have massive factories where tens of thousands of young people (mostly women) do nothing but eat, sleep and work. The pay at Foxconn - generally recognised as being one of the better employers - was less than $150/month before the string of worker suicides. Imagine what conditions and pay are like with a worse employer. Americans are not willing to work under these conditions and pay, and even if they were, it wouldn't be financially viable for most of them.
See, the reason SSDs are so expensive is all the money gets funnelled into weather management tech.
SSDs are dirt cheap to make, I sell plans for $20 where you can make your own out of parts you can get a radioshack for under $30.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
But when labor has more money, they can buy more goods. That makes more jobs, and everyone is better off. A rising tide raises all ships.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The solution is to prohibit corporations that want to do business in America from sidestepping American laws on environmental regulation and wages. Won't ever happen, but that would solve the problem.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My thought was to get a couple of mongo-huge drives and set up basically an internal Linux VPS-host server to hold us off until things get back on track.
Unfortunately, trying to google what one might do to accomplish that is an exercise in pain (results flooded with VPS hosting companies) and, as much as I love FreeBSD, I'd rather avoid a full architecture shift to use jails.
go find me one of those "existing factories", when you do poke around and let me know the expiration date on any leftover supplies.
after you have done that, let me know if you were born before or after the supplies expired
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
i would disagree on wages, as that would effectively ban all developing nations from participating in US markets, however compliance with Environmental and Worker Safety requirements would be a good start.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
This is a much bigger issue than is reported in the mainstream media, and not just with hard drives. I work for a contract electronics manufacturer, and we're really feeling the impact. They are a number of electrical component manufacturers (TI, Toshiba, On Semi, Fairchild just to name a few) that have had their plants affected. Besides hard drives and their respective components, there are a ton of other electronics manufacturers that are saying their plants will be shut down until as late as Q2 of 2012. Expect a lot of consumer electronics to go up in prices, especially as class-3 electronic devices (medical, aerospace) get priority for components.
The higher, the fewer.
No, it would just force companies who want to do business in foreign countries to pay minimum wage.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are multiple code branches of Windows (LDR vs GDR)
I had never heard of LDR vs. GDR until now, apart from GDR being the former East Germany, so I went to Google and typed in windows ldr gdr. It gave me this post:
So in laptop and home situations, where nobody uses anything but Windows Update, what's needed for servicing other than GDR?
and the old files can be needed for future servicing
If the method of servicing used by Windows requires keeping 18 GB of unused files around, then the method of servicing used by Windows is space inefficient, and therefore Windows is space efficient.
I guess that's the part that you Occupy guys don't ever quite suss out.
Do you really think that "the 1%" is going to eat the cost of paying someone better wages and benefits, or do you think they are going to roll that into the price that "the 99%" pays for the same goods and services that they already buy?
How do you think "the 1%" became "the 1%" in the first place? How does it serve "the 99%" to pay more for stuff when they are already financially burdened in this current economy?
The solution to the current problems are WAY more complex than what anyone has put forth thus far. Guys with Nobel prizes in economics don't even understand it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"My god! $30K/year and health insurance? What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?"
How much MORE are YOU willing to pay to fund those wages as opposed to buying from a cheaper supplier?
The reason Americans can afford personal computers is that we don't MAKE them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Sure.. let solve the problem of workers in some other countries being so desperate for a job that they will work in terrible conditions... by taking the demand for their job away! The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The best thing that we can do for workers in those countries is to increase the demand for products produced there, leading to a labor shortage that benefits the workers.
"His name was James Damore."
I have not heard anything about memory production being affected. Perhaps this is the time for companies to be pushing SSDs as an alternative, and maybe pushing down the prices in the process.
This is a common fallacy. When the cost of producing a typical widget goes up (for whatever reason, be it labor, materials, taxes), it most definitely does affect whoever owns the widget producers.
Assume a widget producer selling U widgets for a price X, making net revenues P of (X - C) * U. If C goes up by some value c, that obviously changes things to P = (X - C - c) * U. If the producer passes the entire cost along to the consumer, attempting to make P = (X + c - C - c) * U = (X-C)*U again, the Law of Demand states that higher prices means fewer people buy something, so U will drop by some number u, so P = (X-C) * (U-u), which lowers P again.
I am officially gone from
I don't think China will have to worry about a labor shortage for a long long time.
Two of the countries we're talking about have over a billion people.. might want to think about your plan a bit more.
Yes, nevermind the CEO that needs his annual double digit increase on his salary/stock options - regardless of how well the company is actually doing - on top of the millions he's already making. And don't forget the lobbying and hooker budgets.
The reason we're in the worst economy since the Great Depression and the middle class is disappearing isn't because of the obvious class warfare bullshit being shoveled out by the 1% - it's the fools and tools who lap it up.
I guess the fascist apologists forgot their junior high econ and the fact that all companies already charge whatever the market will bear. If they could jack up prices without it costing them sales, they would go right ahead and do so.
FTFY. Bring back 91% marginal tax rates, repeal anti-union and corporate-written trade laws. The solutions are already out there and they are simple.
Even with friendly management and CEOs who worked for free running benevolent privately held companies with no stockholders to which any fiduciary duty is owed, cheaper labor is still cheaper labor.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"It should be easy enough to restart these (or gear them up), with lower wages."
Citation sorely needed. A building without the specific tooling and production machinery for current drives is....a building.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
That's identical to a punitive tariff, so what you are actually advocating is a trade war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
1. Make laptops with 60GB SSDs instead of 250GB HDDs.
2. Offer them without Windows and package an Ubuntu CD instead.
3. Sell them at the same price as before.
4. Profit!
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The old health system is killing jobs and the GOP wants to kill the new bill as well. Single player will stop jobs from have to deal with health.
How can the health system kill jobs. The new health system IE ObamaCare kills people not jobs . O and by the way it is "Single Payer" NOT "Single Player"
And ObamaCare is NOT "Single Payer". I might have a LITTLE respect for it if it were, but it's the same old crap system with more overhead. There's change I can believe in right there.... sigh....
Nobody told Newegg either. The same 2TB Western Digital Caviar black that I bought 6 months ago is $149.99, $20 cheaper than when I bought it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Tariffs are taxes. What I'm suggesting is that foreign workers get paid more. If any foreign government complains about their workers getting paid more, they're welcome to retaliate by extending their minimum wage laws to US companies that do business in their country.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Perhaps you should research the facts before you ask others to do rethinking. China is already experiencing some regional and sector-based labor shortages, and has been doing so since 2006.
Its real simple to not open your mouth when you know that you dont know what you are talking about. You knew you didn't know, but you spouted anyways. Pathetic.
"His name was James Damore."
"ASUS has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November. 'Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop,' Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters."
And? Fix the problem or lose money, pretty simple.
I'm very certain there are SSD-only manufacturers out there that would
love to pick over dem bones. Quick, hurry... vultures are circling!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Except that the "Law of Demand" in really more like the "observation that demand usually correlates with price."
It's really obnoxious when people cites these "laws."
Have you ever thought about how goofy that sounds?
It's a first order model of a very complicated system. That's it.
All I have to do is cite one single example anywhere in the course of human history where this was not true and this law is no longer a "law."
Can you really not think of a single thing in your life where demand has increased in the face of a price increase? Not even once?
It's shameful that Econ classes still call these concepts "laws". It a useful concept, not an unchanging property of our universe.
Life is too short to proofread.
There are some known exceptions to the law of demand. They include:
* Cases where coercion is involved, so demand doesn't depend on price (e.g. buy this pill or you die from illness).
* Cases where person A is negotiating with person B's money.
* What are sometimes called "Giffen goods" or "snob goods", where the whole point is to show off how rich you are (e.g. the "I'm Rich" iPhone app)
It's just that it works for every other case - some consumers get priced out of the market, some look for substitute goods which are cheaper, and some choose just do without and do something else with the extra cash.
I am officially gone from
It's just that it works for every other case
You could immediately think of 3 cases where it doesn't.
You just claimed those are the ONLY cases where it doesn't.... are you sure about that?
It you try think harder, I'm sure you can find 3 more cases, and then 3 more cases etc.
This "law" is nothing more than a simplifying assumption that is sometimes true. Citing it is no way to shut down an argument. It simply means that one doesn't understand the difference between a predictive model that is often wrong, and actual "natural laws" that are not violate: the laws of thermodynamics, etc.
Life is too short to proofread.
Anecdotal, but...
Western Digital makes a 1TB, 2.5" 9.5mm drive (WD10JPVT). If you need lots of storage for a laptop which will only take a 9.5mm drive, there aren't too many options.
About 2 months ago, I bought 10 of them for $129/each (list was something like $179 I believe). I told a local shop that builds custom laptops about them & they started using them in their builds. Fast forward - I haven't gotten around to using the drives, but the shop called me & asked me if I had any I wanted to sell. I quoted $250/each if they bought all 10, and they didn't even blink.
I wasn't trying to gouge, that was simply the price I needed to make it worth my while (that's why I started at my minimum, instead of starting even higher & working down). If I need the drives in 3 months & have to pay more, too bad for me. That's business 101 & (micro-) economics 101.