Speaking to a supplier yesterday, their HDD prices went up early afternoon, £40 on a 1TB drive!
Inside WD's flooded Thai factory
There is an eerie calm inside Western Digital's flooded hard disk drive plant near Bangkok. It has been transformed into a silent lake. Photo images sent to us and posted on Facebook show the plant rising out of a sea of floodwater. Here are three of the images. First, the approach to the plant: Click to enlarge Closer to …
This topic is closed for new posts.
When I first came here.....
.....this was all flood plain. Everyone said I was daft to build a hard disk plant on a flood plain, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It flooded......
The clue is in the name...
FLOOD plain.
They are building thousands of homes on a flood plain not far from me.
Greed and stupidity are words that spring to mind.
We're also at it.
London for example is on a flood plain. Imagine trying to empty the tube network of water for example!
What a surprise!
Most major settlements are so close to a source of fresh water that they are floodable!
Shame they didn't build it in the traditional Thai style out of teak and on stilts. They evidently knew what they were doing in the old days.
Prior Art
"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp."
Hindsight also says ...
How do you titillate an ocelot?
You oscillate its tit a lot.
Just.....
..add soap and it could be turned into a disc scrubbing plant..
Daft As The Japanese
Lets be thankful it wasn't a fast breeder reactor.
Don't worry, they've got fast breeders … of a different kind.
power boats and paint ball
Let's rent it out for power boats and paint ball guns. And paint grenades.
"Hindsight says it was foolhardy building industrial plant on a floodplain with inadequate flood protection"
Yes, but it was a cheap place to build.... what could go wrong?
Possibly nothing, who knows?
Supposing the savings paid for the risk by already adding more than the cost of the delay and the rebuild, especially when you allow for relevant insurances and premiums, then it's quite possible that nothing went wrong.
After all, nobody was hurt and hard disks remain generally available.
"Hindsight says it was foolhardy building industrial plant on a floodplain .."
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but irrelevant as we can't go back in time.
As they are having to evacuate half of the capital at the moment, it clearly shows that this is an extraordinary weather event and not just a little bit of rain. Clearly extraordinary events are more difficult to prepare for, especially if you are a developing country.
I'm not saying that the Thai authorities are completely blameless in this, but I think we need to cut them a bit of slack.
OK - I'll say it then
The Thai authorities are completely blameless in this
It's up to WD to calculate their own risks.
UK or US
Sure, the facility is flooded & millions worth of manufacturing devices have been lost, but it is still cheaper than building & running a plant in the UK or the US. The annual labor savings alone offset putting three facilities in the West.
Stilts?
Large parts of London are built on a flood plain.
Naples is built next to a highly active Volcano.
The Bay Area is built on a VERY active fault line.
All very stupid, but then people are stupid.
You pays yer money and takes yer risk.
Just don't start bitching when it happens.
Hmmmm
"Hindsight says it was foolhardy building industrial plant on a floodplain with inadequate flood protection."
Foresight said exactly the same thing.
The beancounters said the land was cheap, so get on with it.
Here too
All the building in this area is on flood plain, behind flood defences that the envionment agency are keen to stop maintaining. Planning of course approved by the council. Its all very short sighted. I can't quite understand how the UK government continues to allow new building on flood plains. it is very short sighted given recent flooding incidents in the past few years.
Wet n Dripable
Can I have a WD 500G Black please?
I'm sorry sir all our stock is going green now.
Aren't you writers wishing there was some link with a failure at Seagate?
Well...
If this was a tsunami you could have said...
A working Sea-gate would have protected the WD factory.
But it wasn't
So you can't.
Time to bring HDD production back to the USA
I know a great area that's flat and easy to build on.
It has been proposed to invest there to bring high tech companies in - New Orleans.
Oh, hang on a minute... ;-D
Floodplains
If you only build things on the tops of hills you waste even more money.
Bad timing....
Priced up x4 2tB samsung f4s this morning for a NAS box at £295 just rechecked and now its £384..
Thats another project on hold till next summer
Wooo... Glad I did my NAS last month... Now I'd better keep my fingers crossed that none of the drives need replacing.
Crock
Wonder if the crocodiles have reached the factory yet?
Supply and demand?
On Monday I ordered 3*2TB Seagates from a regular supplier and they accepted the order. They were shown as in stock.
Later that day they were shown as out of stock.
Yesterday they emailed me saying there'd be a delay.
Today they emailed me saying they couldn't get 'em at all.
Meethinks they went straight under the table at the importers, to be sold at inflated prices later.
Crock
And don't forget the crocodiles they have roaming as well!
Look on the bright side
The excutive toilet will not have been affected
Glad I got that F4 last week
Order a Samsung F4 2TB last week (delivered today) for £80.
Just check on eBuyer today, now selling for £130 (reduced from £156)!!!!!!!!!!!
So does this scare explain why ebuyer has bumped the price of a WD 500Gb passport from a previous £60 to £100 ?
PCW is still £65.........
LOL. Not often a shopper buying from PC World has a chance to be smug when confronted with a seasoned online shopper.
37000 WD people
37000 people from this plant alone, many of them with homes underwater, all of them out of work for the foreseeable future. Stop making ill informed cracks about floodplains.
easy tiger
I'm pretty sure most (if not all) the readers/commentors of El Reg feel sympathy for the workers and their plight, but the cracks about floodplains are hardly aimed at them, it's more aimed at the management types who agreed to build a high tech factory on a floodplain. You know the management types I'm talking about, the ones that are probably still being paid a wage and associated benefits while the office is underwater while their subordinates are left wondering how they will feed their families tomorrow.
@wossname
Shan't.
It should be plain to see that humans frequently deal with the flood of emotions created by an event such as this with humour. It doesn't mean we don't feel sympathy for those affected.
In hindsight...
Perhaps they shouldn't have put 60%+ of their manufacturing capacity in one damn plant, considering they're a global company.
FOR SALE
One duck house. Very spacious, well equipped modern interior.
I know just the man to help...
Expenses MP auctions duck island for charity
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11202494
[Fire Sale icon, obv.]
Paul
Best 'Joke of the Day'
GG wrote (elsewhere):
"Seagate probably wouldn’t have a problem with flooding because they have a sea gate… Get it?... Seagate… sea gate… a gate… between them and the sea..."
*** DEGAUSS SCREEN FOR WAVE EFFECT***
Bean Counter "You know you guys wanted a new factory?"
Non bean counter "Yea"
Bean Counter "Well we are giving you one"
Non Bean counter "sweet, where is it?"
Bean Counter "Well not in the UK , Mainland Europe or the USA like you wanted. No we found a nice little plot of land in the Far East our field agent said the land is cheep and the women are very friendly there is a teeny tiny problem though."
Non Bean counter *through gritted teeth* "Go on..."
Bean Counter "There is a teeny tiny microscopic problem of massive flooding at some point, that could cause a massive spike in the global cost of hard drives but that shouldn't concern you".
At this point the non bean counter seeing how this was going, reach over to his phone an rang 3534 (The BOFH emergency service number), 30 seconds later 1 Taser induced "KZZERT" a heavy roll of carpet and a bag of quick lime later the world was saved from this mess.
*** DEGAUSS SCREEN FOR WAVE EFFECT***
We can but deam, we can but dream.
DEGAUSS?
Blimee granddad, you need to get a new computer TV.
'Least his CRT has a degauss button built in… I have a few here that don't.
Hindsight, take 2..
Not only the disk drive industry, but Sony and Nikon's DSLR plants are underwater too.
Seems to me, looking at various photos of flooded factories, that all these companies would have needed to do to prevent 80% of the problem with ruined machinery/inventory was simply to install all the equipment and inventory storage on the 2nd floor.
Make the 1st floor a parking-lot, and as soon as the waters subside, back to business. (Well, except for the issues with other local infrastructure and parts suppliers)
This topic is closed for new posts.
Opinion
David McLeman
My 25 years of comical IT buzzwords
Tim Worstall
Time to take a sniff at the coffee, perhaps
Chris Mellor
Will they have to drag him back like last time?
Popular Stories
Features
Playing the SLA long game
More than just middlemen...
Applications must work for the cloud to float
How a Unix killer crawled from the dot-com bust