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PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives
Lucas123 writes "The impact from the monsoonal flooding in Thailand over the past three months is now being felt by users as computer system manufacturers are unable to meet supply needs. Lenovo told its corporate customers this week that is has run out of a number of drives including several types of 7200rpm and 5400rpm HDDs. 'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,' a Lenovo rep wrote to his clients. IDC this week said the HDD shortages that have resulted from the flooding of four major Thailand industrial parks will likely be felt into 2013. Western Digital and Toshiba have been hit the hardest. PC shipments are also expected to fall short by 3.8 million units in the first quarter of 2012 due to component supply shortages. Meanwhile, there has been some indication of retail HDD price stabilization, but for some of the most popular hard drives prices continue to soar."
We're short on hard drives, and the factory workers are short on homes because of flooding.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I might be wrong, but I feel, really feel like the flooding wasn't that big factor
but rather its great excuse to jack up the prices.
I remember similar story about RAM and Taiwan earthquake, when it was found out that damages to facilities were really minimal.
That's what they get for putting all (or most of) their eggs in one foreign basket.
I mean, sheesh. It's not like "single point of failure" is an unknown concept or anything.
...when you overly optimize for business friendliness. Perhaps moving everything to the Third World was a bad idea after all.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Might this shortage help spur interest in SSDs?
It's time to make the switch to better speed, performance and reliability.
Why isn't China in the hard drive business?
Isn't China one of the leading rare earth metals exporter at the moment?
size so there price will need to come down as well.
... because just before drive production went offline I finally outfitted my new home server with 9TB of storage for just $420. Pretty much my entire life, it's been that once I go and buy some computer hardware, two weeks (or however long the return period is) later, the price is guaranteed to be cut significantly (or a much better version is released).
Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
In unrelated news, my desktop's hard drive just failed 15 minutes ago. Fuck.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
HD's and a lot of other stuff. No, its not the labor rates, its the taxes. We can't do squat as long as we have a 35% corporate tax rate Federally combined with an average 4.5% state tax rate to give us the 2nd-highest corporate tax rate on the planet. All we need to do is abolish the IRS and the income tax, totally, and we'll have an economic boom of biblical proportions. And, we'll make hard drives, too. Its called The Fair Tax. It abolishes the IRS, and taxes consumption instead. It will reindustrialize America.
@_o gay robots
Banks only keep a portion of deposits on hand. This is standard regulated procedure called "Fractional Reserve Lending". No bank can return every despositers funds on demand at the same time. None of them. Anywhere.
When bank runs occur, there is a systemic lack of funds to meet demand due to fractional reserve lending.
This is simply not enough supply to meet demand, and not similar to failure of fractional reserve lending at all.
I guess that means I'll have to settle for one of the unpopular ones.
That is all.
'Akin to the hysteria when banks defaulted in the 1930[s], PC orders across the industry are being placed for which HD supply does not exist,
This is not even remotely "akin".
Looking for a job in Portland, Oregon?
Taxing consumption would appear to shift the tax burden onto those for whom consumption is a greater part of income, namely the working classes that can least afford a tax hike. Wikipedia's article about the FairTax proposal claims that even with a deduction equal to poverty income, the tax rate for the middle class will rise and that for the top 1 percent will fall. Or what am I missing?
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2011/12/02/western-digital-lifts-dec-qtr-view-restarts-thai-mfg-shrs-up/
My first computer had a 256Mb hard drive that stored the OS, applications, files, AND had room left to turn on virtual memory. And I had to walk uphill in the snow to buy floppy disks!
It used to be that if you didn't need a file any more you deleted it. If your disk filled up, you didn't just buy a new one. Aside from graphics, recording, and IT professionals, does anyone really need much more than a few hundred gigs? Or do that many people insist on digitizing their entire DVD library?
Western Digital has restarted HDD production in Thailand earlier than expected.
I'd definitely be a little careful about the first few batches of new drives that come off those assembly lines, considering all the decontamination, repair and re-calibration the flooded manufacturing equipment would have needed. Would be interesting to know if there's going to be a bump in their drive rate failure over the next few years for Western Digital, Hitachi, and Toshiba.
Get some people to build a solid 12 foot high reinforced concrete wall around the factory. Make bridges over it for people and stuff to get in and out. Seal it up really tight. Then you won't have this same exact flooding problem in the next rainy season.
This is an opportunity...
What will Microsoft et al do without a constant supply of itsy-bitsy hyper-overpriced drives to shove into consoles? Will they be forced to buy cheaper 1TB drives off the shelf of Walmart and partition them down to a size that sounds great to a gamer and laughable to everyone else?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I litterally as I was reading these a Seagate 2TB died on me that was part of a 7TB raid0. it's the 8th fucking seagate I have had die on me in the last 2 years. I have had 1 WD die on me in the same amount of time[out of about 25+ active drives 12ish are seagates and the rest are WD or hitachi]. I will NEVER buy another seagate drive for me or my clients. EVER. I've had enough. The last 3 drives I sent in for RMA came back and 1 was DOA 1 died again within 6 months the other was the same fucking drive I sent in and it was still broken. As soon as I am done bitching here I am going to seagate and cancelling my partner program and I am going to pull the 15 or so seagate drives I still have, wipe them and put them on Ebay. I had 10 years of my life on those drives and NO I did not have backups. I'm just one person who can't afford to buy another 7 goddamn TB just to backup my main 7. Though looking back I just lost FAR more of my life then the 1400 dollars it would have cost me to have a spare backup. Do youselves a favor and NEVER buy a fucking Seagate drive, but if your a glutton for punishment I'll have about 10 drives on ebay this weekend you can pick up cheap.
You mean the world isn't a &variable?
Surely you jest...
--
or you are just the unlucky person.
i have never ever had any seagate die on me at ANY point in the last 10 years. not only that, i just had removed a 75 gb seagate drive - one which i forgot when i started using - it may be approx 6 years or more. and from that point on that disk kept spinning while hosting oses on it that changed over time - windowses, linuxes, this that. it had programs and games installed on it too. and it was quite silent even after it was 6 years old, still running well. i removed it, because i replaced it with a ssd.
and even as of now, that disk sits in a drawer, with the image of my ssd which has all oses and programs installed on it as of this moment. if i have any problems, i can just plug in that drive and keep working.
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Why isn't China in the hard drive business?
That's actually a very good question.
There's an parallel situation with semiconductor manufacturing. There's a interesting paucity of foreign companies with fabs in China.. There's only about three entries from foreign companies. All the other fabs in China belong to the native Chinese company SMIC, which has substantial state investment... as well as a history of IP-theft lawsuits.
It's almost as if semiconductor manufacturing corporations were smart enough to foresee the long-term consequences of building up their own future competitors.
Or the military of various countries saw how bad an idea it would be and "encouraged" them not to go overseas.
Here in Australia we just getting over the price hike from the flooding in QLD that caused the price of Bananas to go through the roof, that I could live with but this is insane!
I agree with Tynin flooding is not the factor for raising prices
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i have used around 3-4 seagate drives in the last decade, recommended/bought everyone else seagate drives, anyone i know here almost exclusively uses seagate drives (they sell like hotcakes in turkey, almost every build has seagate), and the times i can remember hearing someone say 'drive died on me' are the times with quantum brand drives, and thats a looong era in the past. (early to mid 1990s).
neither in forums nor among acquaintances i hear people say 'drive died on me'. a lot of people may be even thinking hard drives dont die.
problems you mention may be relevant to bigger than 1 tb drives, teething problems. and the mobos to support them - my new 990fx gigabyte mobo proudly boasts that it can support 3 tb drives, for example.
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So long as they don't run out of my 32 meg drives I'm happy. I'm a little worried when I finally upgrade to Windows 98 but 95 is doing fine on the 32 meg drives. E-mails are a little slow to download but Word 2.0 just blazes. I was considering the upgrade to ME but I hear there's problems so I may just wait since 98 does everything I need and it should kick 95's ass!
I was told in an electronics store that there are supply problems with digital cameras as well. The Canon S100 was supposed to be a big Christmas hit. Amazon in the country where I live has already warned that it will probably not be available until next year.
Good news for some of the competitors models. So I don't think that this is just price jacking . . . Canon would love to sell these, but can't.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
if only there was some sort of technology that could elevate the extremely high value factory above any sort of flood. i think i have the solution. i call it a 'hill'
all i have left in SATA drives is a single 80Gb and that one is going in the new quad i'm building my GF for Xmas. All she does is FB and IM anyway so 80Gb with win 7 HP will be just perfect for her.
Not Linux? Do you just not love her or is this some S+M thing you two are into?
It will break before you outgrow it. That's what the statistics predict anyway. HDDs tend to have a much longer MTBF than SSDs, so you may want to take extra care of those backups.
SSDs MLC technology needs bigger die sizes to remain reliable, or smaller die sizes to remain cheap. Pricing of SSD won't come down that fast, until they come up with affordable new technologies for storing data that are not SLC/MLC flash. There are several technologies that are almost ready for production, but it will be a while before they have proven themselves in the field and have significant market penetration.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
What would be a nice to see: Global movement to help Thais get back on their feet.
What will actually happen: Drive manufacturers scream jackpot as visions of twenty years of price fixing begins. Self-involved consumers look everywhere for someone to shut-up and take their money.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Because the pictures look to me like Katrina hit, except there were no hard drive factories there in New Orleans that got this much press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhumibol_Adulyadej
There shoulda been though. It's too bad countries still don't know how to build proper flood levees, media conglomerates, reps from major hardware manufacturers, governments (shit I didn't say Thailand is run by an autocrat did I?
Too bad that more hard drive manufacturers don't exist in the United States. I guess they all exist in Thailand. (sarcasm, sorry)
What really needs to be addressed in this thread is an entirely two-fold problem: overseas labor taking jobs from the US, and the participation of multinational corporations in the creation of the consumerism which powers those jobs in not sourcing the used hard drive market to the public in a cost effective manner leading to a falsely inflated sense of demand and general market insecurity about the price of hard disk drives, as well as about better storage alternatives than local hard drives.
To me, although the news about hard times in Thailand is upsetting, there have been far worse disasters on the human population in our lifetime. (especially in that part of the world -- the tsunami)
What really should be questioned is what will the storage capacity of hard drives be 5 years from now? 50 years from now? And also, how much does the human brain ACTUALLY store?
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=yro+thailand http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nagin ~ ~ ~ ~
My company makes electric wires (some of the stuff we make go into hard drive motors) and we were hit badly by the flood. We were lucky that we aren't located inside an industrial park so we started going into the factory to recover our machinery on the week that we got flooded, even though the water was chest high. The industrial parks were closed for months before anyone are allowed back in.
It's been 50 days since we were flooded and the entire compound is now dry, but since every piece of machinery is damaged (roughly US$10 million loss) it may take up to three months before we can start production and six months or more before we can go back to the original production capacity.
We were interviewed by Taiwanese TV here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z62rHpW3mgg
You should get a design patent on any manufacturing plant built in a squared-rectangular shape, with rounded corners for safety, and placed on top of an elevated area for flood-protection.
Imagine the profits from suing just because the manufacterer next-door copied your vague, prior-art design and just slapped a 'Samsung' sign out-front.
Seems like a huge opportunity for SSD vendors? We've got a number of projects coming up that require hundreds of new workstations and we're already struggling with getting equipment. I'd gladly pay more per machine to avoid delaying these projects, and end up with better performance as well.
Quick everyone! Gather the USB flash drives and we will RAID them together.
I often say that hard drives on off-the-shelf computers are like tires on cars: They sell them with the cheapest bargain-basement shit they can get their greedy little hands on. And the 5400RPM drive is the knockoff-brand all-season of hard drives.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Murphy must have had an off-day. If Murphy succeeds then two drives within a single RAID-5 set would have failed..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I had a 1TB Seagate drive start throwing SMART errors after 4 years (it was actually an RMA replacement for a Seagate that was giving problems within a month or two of installation) and just sent it in for RMA. I'm kind of curious if they'll start offering cash instead of hard drives at some point or if I can look forward to a coupon for a drive at some future date. Even more fun is that I had a 1 yr old Western Digital Caviar Black at work start going out (it's so much fun backing up 100 gigs of data when the drive transfer rate stutters along for a 2-4 MB/sec average) and their LifeGuard tool keeps telling me the drive passed, even though there's a queue of sectors to reallocate and it'll take a week (literally, 192 hrs) to do the extended tests at the scan rate it's getting.
It's also called market failure. Risk of single-point-of-failure disaster was an externality that now everyone now has to pay for but was not priced into the product up front.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The flooding in Thailand has exposed a manufacturing/marketing culture of Concentration . Clearly , worldwide component users (in this case PC manufacturers) have not done any risk assessment. Why not spread the manufacturing of essential components across a continent. Phillipines , Indonesia ,Vietnam come to mind but also Central American countries . In many of these countries PC components(HDs in this case) can be produced competitivly.
Highlandham in northern Scotland
Assess taxes on the spot for foreign owned assets, with strict penalties. Your exotic car becomes a liability for you, and an opportunity for the US to seize it.
Same thing for yachts - if it has a foreign flag, be prepared to pay tons for the privlege. Even if you think you can hide in international waters.
Enforce the tax law with zeal and indifference to influence. Then make sure loopholes are closed, and the accountants that find them punished.
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Now is probably the right time to sell that stash of old HDDs laying around. You might actually get close to what you originally paid for them!