Flooding Takes Major Hard Drive Plant Offline; Shortages Predicted 203
snydeq writes "Flooding near Bangkok has taken about 25 percent of the world's hard disk manufacturing capacity offline, InfoWorld reports. 'Disk manufacturing sites in Thailand — notably including the largest Western Digital plant — were shut down due to floods around Bangkok last week and are expected to remain shut for at least several more days. The end to flooding is not in sight, and Western Digital now says it could take five to eight months to bring its plants back online.' Toshiba's Thailand plants have also been affected, as have key disk component suppliers, including Nidec and Hutchinson Technologies."
The Dark Side of Specialization: (Score:3)
you're SOL when the specialist is out of commission.
It's sort of fascinating how, despite all our technology, we still suffer from such problems. It seems we may have crossed beyond the point where gained efficiency from specialization has more total cost than slightly less efficient, more flexible (less specialized) industries. In this case the "specialist" is geographical rather than talent, but I think the concept applies well enough.
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> It's sort of fascinating how, despite all our technology, we still suffer from such problems.
I think it's inevitable. Commodity items are highly competitive and have razor thin margins. The manufacturing location tends to be the lowest cost location on earth, and the problem with very low cost locations is that there is sometimes a risk involved in doing business there.
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Are you saying that high cost locations don't suffer from environmental problems?
not a lot of disasters in central north america (Score:2)
I live in the middle of the Canadian shield. About the only natural disaster we see is the occasional small tornado. No floods, no earthquakes, no hurricanes. Nothing large-scale.
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Snow?
2 inches of snow shuts down my town, and we get that much frequently through the winter.
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If two inches of snow can shut down your town, you're not living in Canada.
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If two inches of snow can shut down your town, you're not living in Canada.
Technically, Vancouver and Victoria are still part of Canada.
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Vancouver region, according to Environment Canada, gets between 850mm to 2000mm of percipitation (west to east).
Less than 10% of that falls as snow.
So 2" of snow is practically an entire year's worth of snow to a quarter of the yearly precipitation. For the vast majority of the population in Metro Vancouver, 2" is basically a snowdump. (And some years, it snows not at all.)
Victoria gets even less - it basically shuts down. Snow's an extraordinary event here, which is why it's a favorite spot for seniors and
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Nope, I'm saying that there are reasons why low cost locations are low cost. It's a tendency, not all-or-nothing.
Fascinating Risk Analysis Decision (Score:3)
Giant planning failure!
I can't wait to hear who decided to put the largest HD assembly operation in a flood plain where Asian Monsoons routinely flood out large areas every year.
It is not like this is unexpected.
Restart the plant and...it happens next year or the year thereafter.
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Unfortunately these kinds of plants consume massive amounts of water so they need to be in areas where these things happen.
If its not floods its tornados, earthquakes, volcanos or wars.
Nowhere is safe so most businesses just go with where is cheap.
Dont worry, insurance will cover some of the losses, massive price increases until long after supply has resumed will ensure
the shareholders dont suffer.
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This year has been the worst in half a century, if you're planning for events that infrequent you're going to have a challenge finding anywhere to build your production facilities.
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--That made me ROTFLMAO, so you get one in return ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghzswH4S0C0&list=FL3Zsx4XG4hkee3Z4hLQE3NQ&index=1 [youtube.com]
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In many places, you cannot legally build on floodplain.
In North America, 50 years is pretty short for design standards. Bridges will normally be built for flood events in excess of 100 years. Laws where I live restrict construction inside a 200 year floodplain.
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In many places, you cannot legally build on floodplain.
I think you can if you're prepared to pay the penalty. They're dark green on the map. And volcanoes are those little triangles.
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Giant planning failure!
I can't wait to hear who decided to put the largest HD assembly operation in a flood plain where Asian Monsoons routinely flood out large areas every year.
It is not like this is unexpected.
Restart the plant and...it happens next year or the year thereafter.
Actually its not a flood plain. The river system the Chao Phraya river [wikipedia.org] is connected to runs from Laos and Myanmar to the gulf south of Bangkok and this is the worst rain Thailand has seen in decades, over 300 Thais have been killed in the floods which started in July (it's not October).
It's like blaming the city planners that New Orleans was not hurricane proof.
Put simply, this does not happen once a year.
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It's like blaming the city planners that New Orleans was not hurricane proof.
I hate to tell you...but actually...the New Orleans city planners were to blame.
For roughly the first 200 years of its existence, New Orleans was built on the high ground. Then in the 20th century, they started pumping out the swamps to create large amounts of "real estate" below sea level.
I know...the Dutch have done this very successfully...but the Dutch did not try to reclaim swamps on the delta of a massive river that is constantly trying to find a new path.
For more than 50 years, anyone with half a clu
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By your logic we should abandon the Gulf Coast, Tornado Alley, California, and Texas.
Well, Texas anyway. Who'd want to live there?
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I think the parent was talking more about the people living near the Mississippi River that get flooded every 10 years or so (if not more often). There are large areas of the US that flood on a regular basis, and people go and rebuild there.
Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! (Score:2)
Need more be said. Hard drives are so last year.
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Uh, cloud uses HDDs too. ;)
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I am making fun of all the "cloud" as panacea advertising that is so prevalent.
Re:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! (Score:5, Funny)
And cloud servers don't use hard drives?
No, they just send data back and forth, using the Internet as a giant delay line.
Re:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have often wondered what the total amount of temporary packet storage in the world's routers is.... How much data can actually be in transit at any given time?
Re:Who cares? We have the cloud to save us! (Score:5, Funny)
If you dare suggest we use router/switch buffers as "cloud storage", I'm going to stab you over IP.
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I remember reading that you could use Shannon's juggling theorem to calculate how much data is stored on the wire at any given time. Instead of balls, hands, and flight time, you're looking at packets, routers, and latency, but the calculation is pretty much the same.
Wish I could find that article.
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Are you posting from the Hilbert Hotel?
Gol dern it! (Score:2)
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I tole 'em they shudna moved them faktrees outa tornader alley.
We have some lovely land available, on top of the Hayward Fault. It usually just creeps along, so if they build the factory on wheels it would be OK %)
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We have some lovely land available, on top of the Hayward Fault. It usually just creeps along, so if they build the factory on wheels it would be OK %)
Isn't that where they put the nuclear reactors?
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Simple fact is that the Pacific plate edge is where the cooling water is. Too bad.
I
could tell you why
the ocean's always near the shore,
lot of record breaking floods lately (Score:3, Funny)
Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
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Good thing global climate change is just a liberal hoax, or we'd be in real trouble!
But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
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But global warming tends to produce more floods *and* more droughts
I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
There is no trend or pattern sufficient to disprove, or even challenge it. That sounds more like a religion than science to me.
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Of course you could disprove it. It just takes more than one example to do it. We've been collecting data that suggests global warming for 150 years, if you want to disprove global warming you'd need to gather a similarly sized collection of data that did not agree with the theory.
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We've also been exiting an Ice Age for 10,000 years...
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No, the end of the last glacial period [wikipedia.org] started about 20,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. Since the Holocene optimum [wikipedia.org] about 8,000 years ago temperatures in general have slowly been declining.
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And you think climate scientists are too stupid to take those factors into account. The effects of those things has been studied and compensated for.
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I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it.
Not so. It's fairly straightforward to look for more "extreme" weather--you simply compare the actual weather against the "average". If the differences increase over time, there's your effect.
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Even the USGS cautions that we are experiencing more or less the same number and severity of geological events. However, the number of reporting stations and the spread of people to other areas make it more likely that an event will affect people and thus be noted or reported upon.
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Now, is this number relevant? Not for local weather. Not even for a few years. It can go down or up whether there is glo
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I love that reasoning. It essentially makes global warming impossible to disprove or challenge. There is no evidence that can be used to argue against it. Have a drought? That's global warming. Have a flood? That's global warming. Have a heat wave? Global warming. Have a blizzard? Global warming. Have normal weather? Well, global warming only effects things in the LONG TERM, see...
It increases intensity and frequency of both droughts and floods - it is divergence from 'moderate' climate that is what you are looking for.
If you have a basic understanding of physics it should be obvious that increased warmth would cause more floods and droughts - increased total temperature causes faster evaporation both over land and ocean - for those areas where the clouds tend to not drift (and hence low rain fall historically) this will lead to more droughts; for areas of historical high rain fall -
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Global warming is trivial to prove or disprove - you just measure the surface temperatures all over the world and average it, and we already have plenty of data to show the trend. Showing it is anthropomorphic is harder, but there is a lot of evidence.
What you are talking about is whether or not dramatic weather events are related to global warming. That is much harder to prove/disprove, and almost anyone making such a claim is not being scientific. And over the long term it can be proven/disproven, but
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Or FEWER floods and droughts, or about the same number of floods and droughts.
buildup areas change river flows and food walls (Score:2)
buildup areas change river flows and food walls just move the flood down the river.
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I don't think anybody ever said climate change was going to stop water from evaporating at all. If one place that used to get a lot of rain isn't anymore, that means that the rain is going to be falling somewhere else, which can cause floods.
Deniers seem to think that if the entire world doesn't suffer from the exact same disasters then that obviously means that scientists are either stupid or lying because they hate America or something.
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That's a really funny video.
Summary:
Cap and Trade is bad because of X, instead we should use a better solution which is.... Cap and Trade!
It's a really weird way of saying that Cap and Trade is the only viable solution for pollution reduction, but the proposed implementation is corrupt and ineffective (since it neither caps, nor properly trades).
It is anything they want it to be (Score:2)
The great thing about calling it Global Climate Change is that it is anything the speaker wishes it to be. Any condition can be ascribed to it. Any weather phenomenon that makes the news can be included.
It you make your terms generic enough there isn't much that escapes your grasp.
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But not so long ago we had to be scared of the Global Climate Warming Change Monster because it was going to cause droughts, not floods. It only changed to causing floods after floods started hitting the news.
Actually flooding and droughts have been expected from the beginning. There is greater total energy which results in greater evaporation both over land and over ocean. Thus those areas that recieve modest rain fall historically end up with higher rates of evaporation leading to more frequent droughts, and those areas that have high rain fall historically get more frequent and stronger rains leading to more flooding.
The only ones who thought it was just droughts that would happen had little or no understan
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Good thing cities built on a river delta never flood or we'd be in....oh...wait a minute.
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Not to mention the record breaking droughts in Texas and the SW.
The data does suggest a global warming trend, but some weather shifts are normal. Just because floods wiped out *your* house this year doesn't mean the world is ending and it's all Fox News fault. In this case, the Pacific has been cooler than normal, which changes the jet streams. Which pushes moisture in the air in different ways. It's happened before and will happen again.
Just don't tell that to the dinosaurs.
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I think that countries that have huge clouds of smog are probably polluting just a tad bit more than we are. Such as China.
We might consume more energy than any other country on earth, but we do currently attempt to do it cleanly.
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The fact that global warming has increased the level of water vapor in the atmosphere by about 4% since the 1960's means that there is more water to produce heavier rainfall which would produce larger floods. Global climate is the base on which weather occurs and global warming/climate change changes that base.
Say Hello To Eternal Price Hikes (Score:2)
How long do you think it will take for prices to come back down once all of these plants are repaired or replaced? Will they ever come down? Southeast asian semi-conductor manufacturing is already rife with price-fixing and other grossly anti-competitive practices. Throw in this flooding which, albeit temporarily, provides
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LOL. gas prices will not come down, hahahaha! The only reason gas prices briefly came down was because of the global depression which we entered in 2008, which briefly curtailed all the speculation in the futures market. People will never stop buying gasoline. Just like people will never stop buying storage of some
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You really think HDD manufacturers can afford to raise and keep raised prices with SSD makers breathing down their necks? Yeah, I just don't see that happening. The only advantage HDD makers have now is the price/byte ratio is so low for them. They raise that, and they will die even faster than they are now.
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When SSDs get to $80 for 2TB, let me know. They are nowhere near that price/byte ratio.
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Did all manufacturers get hit by the flood? If not, lawsuits of price fixing might follow if they all start to increase prices for no reason.
Re:Say Hello To Eternal Price Hikes (Score:4, Informative)
Did all manufacturers get hit by the flood? If not, lawsuits of price fixing might follow if they all start to increase prices for no reason.
Lol. You do realize that a 25% reduction in output means the same demand must be met by fewer manufacturers, right? When demand remains constant and supply suddenly decreases, the natural market reaction is a price increase until demand decreases to match supply (or until supply recovers).
Sure, the other manufacturers may be able to increase supply somewhat to counter this, but prices are bound to increase in the short term. Not due to price fixing, but due to normal market forces.
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Yeah, that free market sure is working good, isn't it. In any other context that is labeled fucking opportunism and is an invitation to an ass-kicking.
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But they can all increase prices in response to increased demand with no problem. As long as they don't all appear to do so in a coordinated way.
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Raising prices because you can (ie there is more demand than supply) is not price fixing, no matter how many manufacturers do it. Price fixing generally happens when supply is greater than demand, and the 'competitors' agree not to compete, in order to keep the prices high. A flood wiping out 25% of production is not likely to lead to an oversupply situation, so put your conspiracy theories away.
Seagate... (Score:2)
...is going to wish it had chosen a different name.
(yes, I know that Seagate wasn't listed in TFS)
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What would you suggest : Floodgate? Seawall? Lucky Panda Manufacturing?
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If anything it'll probably just increase the cost of the drives, I'm sure you'll be able to find them readily available somewhere, though at a higher cost. HDD prices are already increasing due to the increasing scarcity of some rare earth magnets.
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HDD prices are already increasing due to the increasing scarcity of some rare earth magnets.
Do you have any reference for this besides the /. article two months ago, which simply parroted the article from some unknown random website?
I just bought a couple of 2TB external (USB2) hard drives for $80 each, including shipping and cables and wall warts. Six months ago, they cost $100 each without shipping.
Seems to me, prices are still dropping.
Perhaps this Thai flood will provide an excuse for price inflation...but I'll believe it when I see it.
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How exactly does the OS make a difference in the performance of a SATA drive?
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I don't know about what GNious is saying, but I have not had problems with hard drives from WD or Seagate in recent history (80GB + Hard drives). WD and Seagate are the top two as far as I am concerned for hard drives. They are both used heavily in all the work servers, and show a disproportionate number of times in desktop systems from HP and Dell.
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So... Seagate ate Maxtor (and now they've gone to crap too). WD is KO for the next "six to eight months" (wtf? really?). Who are we supposed to use now? Hitachi? (I'm serious--I've only purchased WD drives since I had two Maxtors crap out on me).
Luckily, I received two new WD 3TB drives just a couple of weeks ago. Most of our drives are WD, and I have resolved yet again never to buy Seagate. I've had good experience with Samsung as well as with WD.
The only drives which died on me at home in the last 20 years years were (i) a brand new 20GB Maxtor drive died on its first power-up about 12-14 years ago and was replaced under warranty, the replacement outlasting my use for it, (ii) a several-year-old Seagate 340GB died about 3 years ago while movin
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I agree that RAID5 is a much less sensible option than in the past. For large volumes (>1TB) I'm now favouring RAID10 across >=4 drives, but for anything smaller plain old RAID1 on 3 drives makes more sense to me. The result is this: true 3x redundancy, nearly 3x read speed and nearly 1x write speed.
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Pretty sure linux software raid allows it. You don't really need a raid controller for raid 1.
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Software RAID works just fine for RAID 1.
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I had couple of Maxtors of different models go out and they all had the same failing: the flash rom used by the controller apparently is all too temperature sensitive, and it loses data when it gets too hot. Once the the firmware is unrunnable, enter the click of death. I conclude someone there made a poor quality choice in their rom supplier.
I now directly fan-cool my critical drives, which aren't Maxtors anymore either.
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Shortages usually mean higher prices. And if spinning platters become more expensive, more people will turn to solid state instead.
Yeah, prices only have to go up about a factor of a hundred and that 3TB SSD will finally be competitive with my 3TB HDD.
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For those needing bulk storage it would take a MASSIVE rise in the cost of HDDs to make SSDs price competitive.
More interesting is the cost comparison between a basic SSD and a basic HDD. IMO the smallest drive you can reasonablly put in a new computer is arround 60GB, go much lower than that and a lot of users will be running out of disk space but at 60GB most people other than gamers, video hoarders and a few other special classes will be quite happy. That will set you back $69 at current prices. A basic
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I thought with offshoring everything you wouldn't run into these problems.
"Offshoring" doesn't make this a problem for people who buy hard drives Using a single source/vendor makes this a problem.
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If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay, I'd say we're looking at a marketplace price manipulation with a convenient excuse of flooding in Thailand.
The commodity markets use weather as an excuse to try to boink up prices all of the time. Hey Starbucks-- coffee is down 23%-- are you going to drop your recent price hike? Oh, I thought not.
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If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay, I'd say we're looking at a marketplace price manipulation with a convenient excuse of flooding in Thailand.
The commodity markets use weather as an excuse to try to boink up prices all of the time. Hey Starbucks-- coffee is down 23%-- are you going to drop your recent price hike? Oh, I thought not.
Margins are so tight in the HDD market I don't think they'd get away with it, Seagate would happily take their customers.
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If Seagate had such a huge presence in consumer drives, they might be worrisome, but WD and Seagate live in different sales channels, as well as different markets. Go look at a big box computer store these days and tell me about the overlap.
Drives are OEM'd. If a manufacturer has a single point of failure in their process chain, then they're in deep donuts. While I feel for the employees of the affected factories, I don't believe it's going to cause the crisis predicted.
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Really? Seagate has 44 consumer drives and WD has 144, at least on Newegg. WD has more drives mostly because they have numerous models of same size/speed (green, black, blah)
Seagate is a decent competitor to WD, but pretty much the only one worth using.
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SKU quantities belie the actual drives that are manufactured and how many of *those* go inside. Hitachi, Samsung, and a bunch of others make drives. Who makes the drives that go inside those cans? Ah-- there's the interesting statistic.
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If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay,...
How long the delay is is pretty independent of the time it takes to get up to speed later. If you give me a snow globe I can break it in a couple seconds... it would take you far longer to fix.
From the second article it sounds like the plants have experienced water damage: "They asked us to speed up draining water from the plants. If it could be done in one to two months, the company expected to then take about four
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If so, then it's a disaster for them. Yet I've seen SE Asian plants go from hills near a rice paddy to full production in less time. Perhaps I'm wrong about the size of the disaster, and if so, my bad. I've also seen lots of PR and disinformation poised at market price manipulation, so I'll retain my skepticism and hope for the best outcome for all.
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If it takes this long to bring production back up to schedule after a couple weeks delay, I'd say we're looking at a marketplace price manipulation with a convenient excuse of flooding in Thailand.
The commodity markets use weather as an excuse to try to boink up prices all of the time. Hey Starbucks-- coffee is down 23%-- are you going to drop your recent price hike? Oh, I thought not.
Here's the thing though, tech components go up and down all the time. About 12 months ago, the purchase price of DVD writers shot up by A$20 to A$50 (a 66% increase), now it's easy to find one for A$30. As supply contracts, prices go up and people stop buying HDD's. When supply beings to grow again, manufacturers will be forced to lower prices to get rid of stock.
BTW, using Starbucks as an example of good economics or even semi-drinkable coffee is pants on head retarded. Places like Starbucks and McD's h
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I do. It's just a visible example of a company not in the oil biz that raised its price based on commodity price increase claims that were mostly bogus. They just need to report a way-cool quarter to Wall Street. As for their coffee.... well..... that's another website.
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I understand this,
but I cant see how it applies to the tech market. Even with only about 3 players in the HDD market it's still competitive enough that they cannot support to maintain artificially inflated prices.
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I thought with offshoring everything you wouldn't run into these problems.
Me thinks they offshored it a bit too much. If they'd just kept it the _dry_ side of the beach then they'd have been fine.
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Looks like someone took the shore part a little too literally...
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What makes you say that? 'Absorb the loss' is a valid backup plan if the alternatives cost more than the loss being prevented. You wouldn't pay $500/yr for collision insurance on a car worth $300, would you?