back to article Flood-hit Thai disk fabs to pour out 140m drives

The production of hard disk drives is nearing full capacity after flooding last year in Thailand sent shockwaves through the supply chain, with output set to reach around 80 per cent of pre-flood levels. A Digitimes report, citing industry sources, claimed that production would increase to somewhere between 140 and 145 million …

COMMENTS

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  1. Marco van de Voort
    Thumb Up

    Kobe earthquake all over again

    But then it was for DRAM, not HDDs.

  2. Charles Smith

    Eggs in one basket?

    The large manufacturers should not be blaming the floods for the disk shortage. Rather they should be blaming themselves for sourcing their just-in-time suppliers in one location on a flood plain to boot. Management by spreadsheet seems so appealing until things go wrong.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Eggs in one basket?

      Probably also shouldn't put an industrial estate on a known flood plain...

      Apparently WD moved their equipment to the next floor up when they salvaged it from the waters. Perhaps that will mitigate some of the risk in future.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Re: Eggs in one basket?

        Should have non-essential stuff on lower floors, production on upper floors. Problem is how they choose what is non-essential

        1. Dozer
          Coat

          Re: Re: Re: Eggs in one basket?

          Marketing?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    hdd production back to normal

    water surprise!

  4. b166er

    So are these the drives with the reduced warranties?

  5. Crisp
    Megaphone

    Production is back to normal

    So how soon (if ever), will prices get back to normal?

    I'm running out of drive space for tv shows dammit!

    1. Michael 36
      Unhappy

      Re: Production is back to normal

      Where are you finding TV worth recording?

  6. Jerome 0

    "Digitimes’ source predicted that HDD prices would probably rise from 30 to 40 per cent from pre-flood levels"

    I'm not sure I understand this statement. As far as I can see, prices already seem to have come back down, well below a 40% premium above the original price level. Are they saying they'll go back up again? This seems unlikely.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I'd like to know where your finding these hard drives at a lower price. The current HDD price in the UK is stupid! A 500GB HDD will set you back about £70!

    2. icetroggy

      Really?

      I'm obviously looking in the wrong places for disks - a 1TB disk now seems to be around £80, and I'm sure they were more like £40 before the flood, so the current premium is in the region of 100%.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We build houses here in the same stupid way.

    One idea I had was when the insurance paid out on a house, it fixed the damage on the condition that a third floor was put on, and the then ground floor converted to a basement.

    This way, there'd be no furniture damage next time.

    The same is true of Disk Drive factories methinks. Put all the personnel, business analysts, and marketing types downstairs.

  8. Fred Mbogo
    Pint

    Bigger slice of pie?

    Nah, that won't ever happen. They'll never see the light in the fact that they could recoup their dev costs faster by lowering prices. I would actually be interested in getting rid of my main storage drive where I install games with a 4x256GB RAID 0 but the cost is higher than getting a low end NAS with traditional drives at the moment.

    I wish SSDs came down in price. They have many, many, many advantages that could revolutionize enterprise hardware but at the price, one cannot justify the cost. Can you imagine a massive infiniband-connected, 45 drives RAID 5?

    You would still get complaints about speed and snide remarks how their home $300 POS computer is faster but we have LARTs to deal with that.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The HDD Cartel.

  10. Purlieu

    Groan

    At this rate they'll flood the market in 3 months

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