PC Makers Run Short of Popular Drives 353
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."
Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
Plus people have cancer, so no one has the right to complain about anything.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, everything would be great if people weren't people, but they are, so it's important to learn to work with it.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
unimportant things
Right. Now if only someone could define what that means...
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
unimportant things
Right. Now if only someone could define what that means...
Well, we're all hanging around Slashdot - so I don't think we're really qualified to make that call.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:4, Funny)
We're geeks. Computers are on that list. So back to bitching about the lack of hard drives.
Re: (Score:2)
Try harder.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:4)
Complaining does two very useful things. 1) it allows one to vent about things that ought to be better but aren't. 2) it allows one to form the idea of how things ought to be into something that can be communicated to others.
You're in an excellent position for effective complaining, btw...."I woke up for THIS?"
Re: (Score:3)
People can only truly understand something that they have experienced.
When they hear of someones hardship, they can try and "imagine" how it must feel like by comparing it to something they have experienced. They are comparing something they truly know about (their own experience) with something relative to their own experience.
Nobody can truely understand a more extreme experience than they have encountered themselves. i.e. Its always worse when it happens to you.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
What about the people with cancer who lost their home due to flooding, and now can't get a hard drive upgrade. even they aren't allowed to complain? Harsh.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
Dont you understand, this is serious! Its TOTALLY worth comparing to the 1930s depression!
Nice summary tho, totally a good comparison. Might want to throw in a comparison to the loss of drives being similar to the loss of lives in the holocaust, for good measure.
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not comparing the severity of the situation. It is comparing the feedback reaction making that makes the situation worse.
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It's called a run [wikipedia.org].
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It was a Lenovo rep who made that comparison. If he doesn't make his quotas, his children will have to go back to work in the factory making flip-flops for fat Americans and his wife will get sold into sex slavery, so cut the guy a break.
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My fellow-believer,
Despite the less-than-Christian wording of the title of your comment, I must agree with your overall sentiment. It pains me that during the season of Christ's birth, consumers are complaining of a shortage of a material luxury when there are so many people who lost loved-ones and the basic necessities they need to survive because of the flooding. My prayers go out to those affected and those who wanted Santa to bring them that extra 10TB RAID 0+1 array; may the Lord provide the former wi
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Re:Don't bitch. (Score:5, Funny)
My fellow-believer,
Despite the less-than-Christian wording of the title of your comment, I must agree with your overall sentiment. It pains me that during the season of Christ's birth, consumers are complaining of a shortage of a material luxury when there are so many people who lost loved-ones and the basic necessities they need to survive because of the flooding. My prayers go out to those affected and those who wanted Santa to bring them that extra 10TB RAID 0+1 array; may the Lord provide the former with what they need, and may the latter be cured of their addiction to pornography.
Your respectful peer,
Jake
No Christian needs a 10TB RAID0+1 array - Jesus would use RAID6 (with a battery backed caching RAID controller)
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No Christian needs a 10TB RAID0+1 array - Jesus would use RAID6 (with a battery backed caching RAID controller)
Nope, he actually would use RAID5, and thrash the array because a) one disk totally failing on him and b) another one failing reads three times during recovery. But don't worry, somehow a three-day ddrescue would finally bring back all data (to be saved in "the cloud", of course).
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Don't take it out on others just because you're imperfect and ignore all of the S.M.A.R.T. and controller warnings... Some of us tech Gurus do religiously tend to our flock of hard-drives and recognize when they are in spiritual, and physical, need of replacement....
Re:Don't bitch. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I know for a fact you aren't a christian. Your a neocommunist.
I doubt you know that for a fact. But now we all know for a fact you're semiliterate.
rj
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As tech support for a certain four-letter PC manufacturer, because of this I remind peope with good income every day that there has been a natural disaster in another part of the world. I like to think that this has caused some of them to donate to the releif effort.
Meanwhile starvation in Africa goes unoticed.
What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, sheesh. It's not like "single point of failure" is an unknown concept or anything.
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they gambled.
we all lost.
isn't a totally free market GREAT??
no one watches out or cares. its just a blind grab for short term revenues. no one thinks long term. no one does, anymore.
its surprising this hasn't happened *more*.
silly humans. we can't plan for shit, as a species.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you CAN plan for this. By, you know, not putting 75% of the entire world's manufacturing of hard drive motors into a single location.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully this will become a case study for how diversification of supply chain can be immensely profitable - if any one of those companies had split their factories 50/50 with another location, they could basically print money for the next 12 months by undercutting the entire rest of the market by 50% (which would still be above what prices were before the flooding)
It's amazing how companies don't learn - Toyota & Honda did the exact same thing by having a diverse set of models instead of focusing only on gas-guzzling SUV's, and all of a sudden when gas prices skyrocketed they made a fortune.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, but it's a trade off. What if gas prices had fallen? American car companies would have been poised to dominate the market. Or what if, instead of flooding in Thailand, new local resources resulted in 50% lower costs there? You'd have to close your other branches as they would no longer be economical. What if that kind of thing already happened? Maybe there's a reason that geographic location is used for manufacture of hard drives (presence of rare earth elements like neodymium?).
It's all well an
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
The company that had split their factories 50/50 would already be out of business, because their competitors have a more efficient supply chain, are in a single facility, and thus have been undercutting *them* for the last dozen years. The geographic concentration problem of hard drive manufacturers is a result of cutthroat competition, not something that happened in spite of it.
In any manufacturing business where margins are incredibly tight (probably 2-3% net margins on average for hard drives and other pure commodity manufacturers of that sort), you can't spend a bit more than the next guy to buck the trend or you will get undercut for Dell's/HP's/etc. business, lose 20% of your gross sales one night, and find you can no longer cover your overhead and suddenly you're out of business.
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Certainly disasters can happen almost anywhere, but it's not true that you can't foresee or avoid floods. Don't build your factories in a FUCKING FLOOD PLAIN. Or figure the cost of adequate levees into your plans.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
isn't a totally free market GREAT??
When you consider that it resulted in a price drop for 2TB HDDs from $250 or so in 2010 to $75 as of 3 months ago, yes, it is great.
The "spike in prices" is only a spike because of how cheap everything had gotten, and it only got so cheap because of heavy competition. Second guessing things and claiming it would have been better with heavier regulation and restricted ability to outsource is moronic.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:4, Informative)
You're confusing "influence of free market" with "influence of technological progress". Former had little to nothing to do with prices of medium going down as technological progress made better technologies and processes available for use.
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You're confusing "influence of free market" with "influence of technological progress". Former had little to nothing to do with prices of medium going down as technological progress made better technologies and processes available for use.
And, uh, where do you think that technological progress came from? You think the Glorious People's Hard Drive Committee would have delivered $250 3TB hard drives to the world?
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they gambled.
we all lost.
They tried to lower costs and considered the risks, but got zapped anyways. Maybe they learned something. I've enjoyed satisfyingly low prices combined with generous leaps in capacity for years now, so I can't see that I "lost". A year from now, they will be back on the bargain treadmill.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we didn't. We all won. Even with the price increases, hard disks are available and the price per terabyte is ridiculously cheap. The only people who think they lost, are the whiney bitches who are comparing the prices to what they were a couple months ago. Try comparing the cost to what it was two years ago, and terabytes are slightly cheaper except they also use fewer SATA ports.
What we're seeing isn't expensiveness; it's volatility. If you can't handle that the prices sometimes vary between "dirt cheap" and "cheaper than dirt," then boo-fucking-hoo. DO NOT make me start sentences with "I remember when," you spoiled little whipper-snapper.
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I was just thinking that the one thing that would help bring hard drive prices back down would be to sprinkle a little government regulation into the mix.
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You said it.
Re:What do they expect? (Score:5, Funny)
This is what you get... (Score:3)
...when you overly optimize for business friendliness. Perhaps moving everything to the Third World was a bad idea after all.
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It wasn't just moving everything to the third world that was stupid. It was moving everything to a single fucking flood plain in one small spot of the third world that was stupid. I think we have found out why real estate was so fucking cheap there.
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It had nothing to do with the location, it had to do with placing everything in a single place. It's probably cheaper that way.
If the plant were in the US and the flooding occurred there, the result would have been the same. Capitalism logic dictates: to maximize profits you need to lower expenses, including wages as much as you can. Especially if you have someone competing with the same product.
"Third world" (obsolete term without Second world) countries allow lower wages and more exploitation (more workin
No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:2)
Re:No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:5, Funny)
why, because SSD's float?
(too soon?)
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That's silly. Even with the current rise in hard drive prices, SSDs are still terribly expensive by comparison. Otherwise, SSDs would have already been seen as competitive against hard drives even before this supply problem.
Only 2x or 3x for a lot better performance? Not everyone would have jumped on it but there still would have been plenty of performance minded consumers lining up to buy them.
Even with limited supply, it still makes much more sense to escalate to larger drive sizes before going to SSD.
Re:No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's silly. Even with the current rise in hard drive prices, SSDs are still terribly expensive by comparison. Otherwise, SSDs would have already been seen as competitive against hard drives even before this supply problem.
Only 2x or 3x for a lot better performance? Not everyone would have jumped on it but there still would have been plenty of performance minded consumers lining up to buy them.
Even with limited supply, it still makes much more sense to escalate to larger drive sizes before going to SSD.
Terribly expensive if you look at price per GB, but not terribly expensive if you're just interested in getting a nice, high performance, low power, quiet drive, and don't need a ton of disk space, then SSD's are quite reasonable.
Newegg sells a 120GB SSD for about the same price as a 1TB hard disk drive. Most people (well, maybe not the Slashdot crowd) don't need a TB of disk space and the SSD will work quite nicely for them.
When I upgraded from a 1TB drive to a 64GB SSD in my desktop, I kept the 1TB drive for my large storage needs. It turns out that except for a single DVD that I ripped a few months ago, I haven't stored anything on the 1TB drive, and still have lots of room on the 64GB drive. My 8GB of photos and 12GB of music still leave me lots of room to grow. I imaging that by the time I do outgrow the 64GB drive, I'll be able to buy a 256GB or even 512GB SSD for the same or less price than I paid for the 64GB drive.
I think the problem that computer manufacturers face is that when a consumer sees a computer with a 500GB hard drive next to one with a 120GB SSD, they are going to go for the 500GB hard drive since bigger numbers are better.
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That's silly. Even with the current rise in hard drive prices, SSDs are still terribly expensive by comparison.
It depends on what you are comparing.
If cost per gigabyte is your main concern then HDDs arround 2TB are still your best bet by far.
OTOH if you are comparing cost of a system drive for an office desktop things are much closer. A 60GB drive will let you install windows,office etc and still have half free. Looking at my local supplier the cheapest sata HDD* is arround £70 while a 60GB SSD is arround £80.
In the early days of the crisis there were smaller SATA drives available cheaper but at least a
Re:No HHDs = SSDs? (Score:4, Informative)
*there is a 120GB IDE drive for £33 but afaict most modern motherboards don't have IDE.
So, if your motherboard does not have IDE, it is still cheaper to buy an IDE drive and a IDE-SATA adapter.
Clearly something is wrong here... (Score:5, Funny)
... 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.
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Here's hoping that the current batch of drives last long enough for the prices to correct themselves.
I just bought a bunch of drives myself too. It had been a few years since buying the last batch and seemed like a good time to get ahead of the older batch of aging hard drives.
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Someone needs to check the alignment of the universe.
you're right, its out.
be a dear and find us a left handed monkey wrench.
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I got lucky as well.
I just happened to have finished over the past year buying 2TB drives during various $69-$89 Fry's Electronics specials.
I'm currently using ten of them. :-)
In unrelated news... (Score:2)
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No, it is not like a bank run. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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We have the FDIC to protect depositors and we have the Fed to protect the banks from liquidity problems.
Liquidity problems only kill a business because they have to dump capital overboard to circling swarms of sharks that take advantage of the emergency to extract bargains.
Ridiculous Comparison (Score:2)
'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".
And in other news (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [forbes.com]
Post-flood hard drives (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I'm not sure how you would tell. I had a WD drive fail after a few hours of use last year and its replacement will consistently fail after about 900GB is written. According to the SMART data it is perfect, but irrespective of the enclosure it is in, or the cables used, or the host it is connected to, I get I/O failures after writing ~900GB of data (on a 1TB drive).
Re:Post-flood hard drives (Score:4, Interesting)
It's hard to predict, but it's also possible the quality will take a jump upward because the equipment is freshly reconditioned or certified.
Back in my day . . . (Score:3)
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?
Re:Back in my day . . . (Score:5, Funny)
256MB? Get off my lawn. My first computer did not even have a hard drive.
Damn kids.
In other words (Score:2)
This is an opportunity...
Even the teensy ones? (Score:2, Troll)
What will Microsoft et al do without a constant supply of itsy-bitsy hyper-overpriced drives to shove into consoles? Will they be forced to buy cheaper 1TB drives off the shelf of Walmart and partition them down to a size that sounds great to a gamer and laughable to everyone else?
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
price of SDD is still more then HDD of the same si (Score:2)
size so there price will need to come down as well.
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Better reliability is a somewhat dubious claim.
Given the current pricing on SSDs, reasonably priced drives represent the amount of storage available on laptop hard drives 10 years ago. If I am not using my old laptop drive from 2002 it is not because it's not reliable enough but simply due to the fact that it was overtaken by technology.
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.
Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Informative)
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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Speed and performance are the same thing, and reliability is pointing towards HDDs in terms of controller reliability, media reliability and amount of bugs due to technology being still in infancy.
And of course, let's not forget price per amount of storage.
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Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Or, buy a hard drive (or a few of them) that costs as much as the 120GB SSD, keep the OS on the current 15kRPM hard drive and not worry about free space for quite some time.
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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 amou
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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.
Re:SSD Time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you try and use SSDs for bulk storage you will waste a ton of money.
Use them for files with heavy random use patterns though (e.g. your OS and apps) and you will get a big boost in responsiveness for a relatively small outlay. Especially if the machine is a bit short on ram and can't take a ram upgrade.
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It's time to make the switch to better speed, performance and reliability.
SSDs will remain the toys of those who want large e-penises (replace with organ of choice) and those few who really "need" the speed until the price comes down to something less than gold pressed diamonds.
Not to say they're worthless. Just vastly overpriced and overrated for the vast majority of people.
With a 64GB or 120GB SSD costing around the same as a 1TB had drive, I think the hard drive is the big e-penis, and the SSD is for people that know that size doesn't matter (for most people).
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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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
GF (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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"I'd like her to have a functional OS and Linux doesn't cut the mustard friend."
Apparently you haven't used Ubuntu in a while (ignoring PulseAudio bullshit.)
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Yeah, that was Mark Twain: "Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket."
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [brightsideofnews.com]
I couldn't bring myself to look for pictures/video from the surrounding area, but my heart does go out to them.
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Seagate buys Samsung hard disk unit [reuters.com]
Re:Scam??? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [brightsideofnews.com]
http://www.innovationpov.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/HDD-Production-Equip.jpg [innovationpov.com]
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Re:China to the rescue? (Score:5, Interesting)
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. [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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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 e
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You'd be compounding the problem given that they aren't known for quality.
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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
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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.