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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.
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?
... 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.
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 don't think it's just an excuse to jack up prices. Guy at work today was trying to get a hard drive to build a server, and I hear him on the phone. "Wait, what do you mean they're no available anywhere?"
It makes me wonder why we're building so many in the same place. Doesn't anyone remember the saying at putting all of your eggs in one basket?
That said, compared to the effect on the people, it seems trivial.
'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?
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.
Wish it was a scam... but I cannot help but feel sorry for their loss. Please check out these pics, showing the damage done, I haven't been able to find any newer pics, but the damage is beyond bad.
To address your concerns on this hdd scam, I present pics of from a Western Digital production plant:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/11/1/photo-horrific-images-of-flooded-western-digital-factory.aspx
I couldn't bring myself to look for pictures/video from the surrounding area, but my heart does go out to them.
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/
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.
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?
Uhhh...Tigerdirect was selling a Seagate 1.5Tb for $69 the other day, the 1Tb external for $99 so there are drives still out there, you just got to keep an eye out. I would suggest having an email account where you get the daily emails from ALL the major and minor tech stores, from Tiger and Newegg to Surpluscomputers and Geeks. That way since most of these things are first come you can jump in quick enough. BTW sellout.Woot! usually has all the sales listed so i'd add them to my daily checklist.
I'm just glad i got my 6Tb worth of space before the flood along with taking care of my long time customers and family. 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. I just hope the guy bringing me some off lease boxes this weekend has drives in them, because i'm down to a handful of IDE drives from 40Gb to 200Gb and then that's it. Lucky for me this time of year i already have the new boxes sold and all that is left is the off lease for those looking for a last minute affordable PC.
Man the moron that thought putting all the eggs in one basket ought to be FIRED. Does anybody know if the Maxtor factories were located there too? Because it seems like all I'm seeing now is Seagate drives and I'm wondering if they are not just using the Maxtor facility and slapping Seagate labels on them.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You've obviously not used a machine with the OS and apps on a SSD.
I will not be getting another computer without a SSD.
Sure, for bulk data, such as music, movies and photos, these all live on spinning disks, but for things where latency and throughput matters, SSDs are more than worth the additional cost.
Configure you machine with a small (120GB is usually enough) SSD. Put your OS and all your Apps on this disk. Put everything else on a multi-TB spinning disk and you will feel like it's a whole new computer.
You'd be crazy (or just too rich to care I suppose) if you wanted your media collection to live on SSD, but even for that hybrid disks are pretty good in a lot of usage scenarios.
You'll also get little to no benefit putting SSDs on a RAID controller - most RAID controllers are optimised for the access times and throughput of regular hard disks, even if in this case regular means a 15k RPM SAS disk.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
SSDs of respectable make and model can be found as low as a dollar per gigabyte these days. Either you've never used an SSD in your daily computing, or you have a very unusual perception of value. An SSD as an OS/application drive is by far the most noticeable upgrade that you can perform on a current desktop computer.
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.
You are missing the fact that the well-to-do's spending on their toys far outstrips what they've been paying in income taxes, and especially since they are so masterful at hiding their income from the taxes. You also have to study the Fair Tax to know that no poor person pays a penny of Fair Tax. Also good to know is the fact the the income taxes are highly regressive, starting with 15.3% of the 1st dollar that the poor person makes, in the form of the payroll taxes (social security and medicare) and are further compounded by the hidden income tax in the price of all American-manufactured goods, which amounts to, on average, about 22% of the selling price of those goods. Add everything together, and the poor are being crushed by up to 37% taxes on their income right now. The Fair Tax would reduce that to zero via the mechanism of a prebate, which is essentially the gov't giving every social-security-number-carrying American enough money each month to pay the Fair Tax on income up to the poverty level. So, if you are making the poverty level, you pay no tax. If you are making less than the poverty level, you get a bit of a subsidy. If you are making millions, you're going to be sending millions to Washington when you buy your next $70 million dollar yacht.
As for the middle class taxes rising, my own taxes would fall about $2K, and at somewhat less than $100K income, I'm square in the middle of the middle class. The testimony of 2 Fair Tax experts before the house ways and means committee earlier this year stated the fact of the rich's spending outstripping the middle class's tax burden. It;s here:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx?EventID=252676
And if you go down to the bottom of that page, you can call up the video of the whole testimony and get those statements in real-time, on video. Unfortunately, I think that comes at about 1 hr and 36 minutes into the testimony, if I remember right.
They are neither over priced or overrated. Just misunderstood.
Gen 1 was shit, much like the first automobiles. Just a curiosity for the early adopters and extremophiles. The latest ones are not really over priced. That's just what it costs, which reflects what the market will bear. Sure, there might be price fixing, but for what it *is*, it seems reasonable depending on the model and features.
It is most certainly not overrated. The performance increase is quite substantial over spinning media. Form factor and density are pretty darn good too. Let's not forget that with no moving parts you don't have to worry about letting it fall. Of course, spinning media has some features to mitigate that, but SSD mitigates it by fundamental design.
My own laptop has a small 64GB SSD and two 1TB "normal" drives. The responsiveness of the OS *skyrocketed*. You don't need huge SSDs. The smallest SSD on market would probably suffice.
This is where they are misunderstood. With proper configuration you can move all user data to the larger cheaper drives and use the SSD for core files and temporary storage/cache. Even with Windows 7 bloated to all hell I still have a lot of programs installed (faster to have their files on the SSD too) with almost 1/3rd of the drive free. It's nice to not have to defrag either. With TRIM support the reliability and lifetime of the drive goes up quite a bit too.
Where they are not overrated at all is server applications. You can build a very very fast DB server with some SSD's. So there are valid enterprise use cases for SSDs when you compare their costs against vastly more expensive solutions delivering higher I/O and throughput such as the ioDrive2. There are quite a few drawbacks to a PCI-E implementation of SSD that can balance against the resultant bottleneck of the SATA bus. However, with 6 GB/s SATA that is less of a concern and there are some pretty decent SATA RAID controllers that can better handle the load. For a number of database applications you don't need a large amount of space, but higher performance. Build a RAID with cheaper and more affordable 64GB SSDs with a decent controller ($1500-200$) and you have a storage solution at about 25% of the cost of the enterprise PCI-E SSD solutions.
Like I said, very misunderstood.
The vast majority of people would see a tangible and cost justified benefit simply be using it for the core OS files. I know I am.
I might be wrong
You are wrong:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/Data/2011_11_1/PHOTO-Horrific-Images-of-Flooded-Western-Digital-Factory/WD_FloodB_689.jpg
http://www.innovationpov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HDD-Production-Equip.jpg
And note that while idevices and similar are "made" in china they are made by chinese contractors, not by the western companies that sell them.
Afaict the trick to dealing with china is to keep your assets (both "IP" and tangible) OUT of the country. Sure get em to fab and assemble the PCBs and put them in boxes (it's not as though they will learn anything they couldn't learn by buying your product and dissecting it) but don't put anything in that you can't afford to lose (and if you are a big company that extends to having the dealing with local companies be done in a manner that does not involve your executives traveling to china where they can be held hostage on trumped-up charges).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Uh, all the eggs were not in one basket. I heard figures of around 10-20% of world hard drive production that was in Thailand. Not even sure that ALL the production in Thailand was affected. Then there is sub-component production, which complicates the picture.
The real problem is that there wasn't excess capacity. Also, the just-in-time inventory fad where nobody actually stocks anything any more makes any disturbance like this much more critical. But mostly I think there are elements in the manufacturing, distribution, and retailing chain that are orgasmic about the opportunity for gouging afforded by the disturbance. As always, it's very difficult to pinpoint the profiteers, but they are clearly there.
Hope you guys are enjoying the invisible hand of the ingrown corrupt super-capitalist market which you worship. It's more like an invisible phallus raping you in your sleep.
Have you seen the photos of the WD factory? The water was near the ceiling on the ground floor. Vehicles in the loading bays were submerged to the roofline. This was a significant flood event.
since I can't find a delete I need to appoligize for my outburst. I was in [and still am] in a kind of shock you only feel when you realize you didn't plan ahead and lost almost 6 TB worth of data that I have accumilated over the years, all my programs sources, old websites I have done, all my games, mp3s, movies, dvd/blu-ray rips [that can take an hour + each to rip :(:(:(:(:(:(:(] But where does one backup THAT much data?
Anyway sorry for the outburst, I am sorry if anyone took the time to read my post.
Better reliability is a somewhat dubious claim.[...]
Until stories of people chugging along on 5 or 7 year old SSDs are commonplace, the technology simply won't have the track record to justify such claims.
I have no idea why people insist on their drives being so damn reliable. Shit breaks. You need to have a backup plan. You can get free, reliable disk-imaging software that mirrors your drive(s) for all three major desktop OSs.
I run all my personal laptops on SSDs with a weekly imaging (my OSX laptop has time machine that runs nightly). If my drive fails, I just boot from external for immediate issues, and I can replace the drive in a day or two if while I RMA or buy a replacement.
The key here is to have a process that emphasizes backups. I've gotten all my relatives on the religion too... nowadays there's no excuse other than you wanted to save $100 or so to not buy a 2nd external HDD.
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"Doesn't anyone remember the saying at putting all of your eggs in one basket?"
Yeah, that was Mark Twain: "Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket."
So let me get this straight, you had a multi-drive RAID0 array and you are upset that it crashed? Do actually know anything about hard drive reliability rates? Well, you do now.
RAID was invented for a reason. Controllers support hot spares for a reason.
Lesson for next time. Go with RAID5 or RAID6 and eat the loss of capacity. Parity is worth it. Granted, RAID is not a backup strategy but RAID0 is just a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. You will have a drive failure. It is inevitable.
if you're talking about 15k enterprise drives (yes, I was and I nearly added this comment too) then dollars per gigabyte they compare pretty well to SSD.
Here RRP on a Seagate Cheetah 15k.7 600GB SAS hard drive is $914 - this is an enterprise-grade server hard disk.
An Intel 320 Series 600GB SSD is $1684 - not even twice as expensive.
No matter how you configure spinning hard disks, you will not get the IOPS that you can easily get from a single SSD.
If you haven't extensively used a machine with a SSD, no amount of argument I make will sway you to realise what incredible value for money a SSD actually is in real-world usage scenarios.
Buy an SSD for your OS and Apps. Buy multi-TB disks for your bulk data. Never have to worry about disk iops or throughput or free space for quite some time.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
All hard drives are prone to failure. Sometimes you get lucky and find some that run for 5 years or more, and sometimes not. Back in the old days, I thought the WD Caviar was a terrible model, but now it seems to be good. I like Seagate in general, but I did have two drives with a chirping problem. I'm running on two Samsung drives now that seem a little slow, but reliable.
Backup considerations really need to come first. I only have 500 megs of data, so I run an automatic Ghost image each night. But with 6 TB, I would cut it in half and make do with 3 TB, mirrored.
I have a friend out there who's been sending photos. His entire ground floor is flooded. He ran out of food last week and had to go out to get more. This involved swimming from his house, with a crocodile (or possibly alligator, I'm not sure which you get in Thailand) watching him from the opposite side of the canal (apparently it attacked a few people, but no one was killed). This doesn't sound like the ideal conditions for getting the raw materials or workers to the factory, and shipping the finished product would be quite a literal description. Oh, and his landline Internet has been down for over a month, but he's able to use 3G.
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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?
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
Seagate buys Samsung hard disk unit