Drama as Thai frogmen struggle to save world PC market
The Thai government has dispatched a crack squad of navy divers in a bid to glean WD factory equipment currently lost below metres of flood water. It is now more than a month since the flooding devastated parts of the country with 562 people confirmed dead, four million households affected and 14,000 factories inundated – …
Frogmen, recovering MACHINERY!! Is our insatiable capitalist, consumerist lust for disks so heroin-addict-strong that we're rescuing factories and not people, are our demands for unsustainable, exponential growth and progress so greed-ridden and amoral than we can't just buy less, are we going to ignore this massive fallacy of capitalism and out-sourcing? I remember when this happened with RAM prices and it seems we haven't taught the old money-grubbing dogs any new tricks, nor any respect, manners or decency.
I'd rather defer my disk purchase while there are people dying out there, but hey, that probably just makes me flame bait right?
@MrCheese - Look around, yes....yes it is....
You appear, yet again, to be reading/commenting in the wrong publication. This fine journal, in the main, reports on matters relating to IT and the issues affected by such.
You will find there is much other reporting going on which would suit as a vehicle for your brainspurts.
Perhaps if you started here; http://goo.gl/I3f1u and left the rest of us to ponder our HDD supply chain quandary.
Thx.
Western Digital is the jobs and livelihood of 37,000 families in Thailand + all the people they buy things from, so if those people want to have food on the table, I guess getting WD's factories up and running again is quite important. Obviously pulling people out of the floodwaters is more important, but I think we are mostly past that stage now.
Who did you have in mind who might have been holding their breath underwater for over a month and thus still requires rescue by divers?
...I think that after a month or so of being underwater, any people the frogmen find will be beyond rescuing.
...my hard drive is OK at the moment so I can afford to get righteous and preachy.
(As far as I know, the people affected have been temporarily rehoused. It has been a month after all and little can be done whilst the waters remain. On the other hand - ignoring the commercial consequences will do no good in the long run as once the waters have subsided there will be a need for re-employment, economic activity and so on).
But, bottom line is, commercial organisations will be trying to minimise their losses. Insurance companies will have large risk-reducing teams. It's quite likely that they will be paying the bills for the salvage work.
All we can hope is that this work is not taking resources away from life-saving operations.
"Frogmen, recovering MACHINERY!! Is our insatiable capitalist, consumerist lust for disks so heroin-addict-strong that we're rescuing factories and not people"
Well frogmen are kindof specialised in working UNDER water. Any people who have been hanging around under water for the last few months are probably a bit beyond helping now. And making hard drives is probably what helps a whole lot of live people in Thailand put food on the table so to speak. Might be worth a swim to fetch the machines that make it possible.
At this point, it's simply recovery... unless you think the Thai citizens can hold their breath for weeks on end?
Would you REALLY have the frogmen looking for survivors at this point, or would you have them busy trying to salvage the future for citizens who depend on those WD jobs to survive?
"...my hard drive is OK at the moment so I can afford to get righteous and preachy."
*ZZZT* *Tick*
*ZZZT* *Tick*
*ZZZT* *Tick*
Oh, bugger!
There is a nice little video on youtube of the site from 14/11/11 its still flodded.
The equipment will be a write off. clean rooms wont be clean any more.
there is one thing for un bolting stuff, but how are they going to lift it out with out removing roofs or cutting holes in walls?
dont thing they will be able to get a barge in to move anything out from the video. still weeks till the water goes down.
OK I'll concede that comment is a) on the wrong site and vented in the wrong forum and b) restoration of the plant is one of the best ways to recover the situation and livelihoods of the flood victims.
As for a storage quandary, I can't see a lot to ponder, storage will cost more, simple supply and demand and the consensus of opinion that we can't reduce our current consumption boils the situation back down to a choice between continuing to buy mechanical disks or migrating to solid-state as the cost difference shrinks.
Then again I don't buy a huge amount of storage, it'd be interesting to hear from someone who does and what this means to them.
... for work, but my budgets will be the same, therefore costs shall be shaved elsewhere on new servers, Intel, AMD, Dell, HP will suffer as I will be buying lower base models of server to compensate, maybe less RAM as well, perhaps Micron, Samsung et al could lose out too.
I can't avoid the need for 2/4/6 drives for the RAID configurations on a live server.
"removing roofs or cutting holes in walls?"
Massive floods tend to handle roof and wall removal for you quite efficiently
http://wdc.com/en/company/thailandupdates/
Daniel Mauerhofer, WD Munich, Germany
Let's hope the frogmen don't run into any escaped crocodiles.
As I understand it, the Thai people and businesses there had significant time to prepare. Yes, its been devastating for people but just as people had time to move to more secure locations, surely businesses had plenty of time to arrange their affairs. If it's (allegedly) appropriate to rescue kit from flooded fabrication lines, wouldn't it have been more prudent to do so *before* being inundated?
This approach is so obvious I can only assume this is a bogus story.
You can be as prepared as the best Scouts out there, but you still only have limited time and resources to get things out of the way.
You also have to imagine how hard it would be to convince staff to stay and ready the work site when their own homes were also threatened - what would you do?
