Western Digital Says Contamination Impacting Production at Japanese Facilities (reuters.com) 55
Western Digital said on Wednesday certain materials at two of its manufacturing units in Japan, operated by joint-venture partner Kioxia Holdings, were contaminated and will result in reduced availability of flash storage devices. From a report: According to the company's current assessment, there would be a shortage of at least 6.5 exabytes in flash storage availability. One exabyte equals one billion gigabytes. Western Digital is working closely with Kioxia to implement necessary measures that will restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible.
Exabyte (Score:1)
One exabyte equals one billion gigabytes.
Is that a metric billion or or an imperial billion?
A few ruining it for everybody. (Score:1)
With the chip shortage caused by the backup of ships coming out of the Bering Straight, the truckers at the US/Canada borders blocking imports, and now this... we've got some serious problems forming.
Seems like a few incompetent people are having massive effects lately. Can't the world do things right?
Re:A few ruining it for everybody. (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like a few incompetent people are having massive effects lately.
More than a few -- hell, there are 535 in the US Congress alone. :-)
Can't the world do things right?
Nope, it's run by people. Many of them, well... see above.
What a poor journalism (Score:2)
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Calm down. They were detected in quality control and aren't going to be sold.
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Well. Depends on what brand of SSD you are buying. There is a market for semiconductors that are not up to spec.
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Sooo.. Amazon marketplace!
Probably.
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These will be used for CCTV video backups at the same facility Jefferey Epstein killed himself.
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Why are you assuming there were any SSDs manufactured with the contaminated material? The article doesn't mention any kind of quality problem with SSDs, it just says they can't make them now.
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Yes. And having worked in the industry for 10+ years, I know they also do a lot of corner cutting when they believe they can get away with it. "The data shows, after running many batches through our full test suite, that tests A,B,F,and J are highly correlated, therefore, we can skip all but one them." That will be always good enough to weed out all the bad chips, right?
Having worked "10 years" in the industry are you now admitting that they DO test before shipping?
In fact, a lot of what we did in the industry was to water down the specifications such that we could always meet them, even on the worst batches. Some parts would perform way better, but if the market wasn't beating down our doors for a better spec'ed part, there was no reason to advertise we had that capability or to create a bin for them
If it meets a specification then it ships. These chips obviously met no specifications and had to be scrapped.
Message received (Score:3)
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Not any SSD made in their facilities, anyway.
A true pain in the.. (Score:1)
..wallet, if you're planning on buying a current-gen gaming console. Modern games gobble up storage like nobody's business, so a flash drive shortage truly is unwelcome news.
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Useless numbers (Score:3)
What we need is, how many 1TB drives are now gone from in-stock, 512GB drives, etc. Giving numbers in exabytes is bloody useless!
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Last question . . . do you know what exa, tera, peta, etc., mean? If you made it out of grade school arithmetic, you should be able to figure it out, yes?
TFA states there will be a shortage of 6.5EB SSD storage. How many of what size SSD's is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Making all readers do some research and calculations, as simple a process as it may be, is bad journalism.
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Giving the number as 1TB SSD's would have been sufficient. But that's not my job, nor yours. It was supposed to be done by the so-called journalist who reported the news.
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Why is terabytes any better than gigabytes? The summary clearly says one exabyte is a billion gigabytes.
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As long as you were taught engineering notation in high school algebra, yes (and - yes, I noticed that you stuck to multiples of three for the exponent. Nice touch).
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Do you own a calculator? For extra points, do you know how to use it?
If TFA's author, the person submitting the article, or the editor does the computation, including its result in the summary, it only has to be computed once (plus a few times by others checking that didn't have an error).
If not, how many millions of readers have to do it for themselves (and also risk getting it wrong). How much wasted time and manpower?
Presenting such stats in an immediately usable form is not just good journalism. It i
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What 'computation' would you have them do? This is raw material. How the shortfall affects different product lines is a business decision by WD, not some journalist, submitter, or editor. And chances are pretty good even WD does not yet know what the impact on various products will be.
Price Manipulation 101. (Score:1)
Why is this story written as if we're reading about a company that had a bad batch of spinach?
Like the world understands "a shortage of at least 6.5 exabytes." Just say in plain english what the impact of that is on consumers instead of abusing shit like this to jack up prices tomorrow.
For all we know "normal operational status" could be resumed in 3 days with zero impact, and then we'll read about record profits a quarter from now.
Sick of market-fucking profit-driven non-stories like this.
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Most likely Western Digital must disclose anything that affects their revenue to their shareholders. This incident will affect their bottom line. If they had delayed releasing this information there would probably a shareholder lawsuit.
Well, I'm guessing if you approached the Board of Directors with "6.5 exabytes" as your answer to business impact, they'd be slightly irate.
No matter their obligation, Corporate Greed knows damn well the knee-jerk reactions will happen from even vague announcements like this, driving sales with (false?) panic during a time when you can easily drive sales with a little hype and bullshit. No, I'm not saying they would lie about an actual event. I'm saying they might conveniently exaggerate the impact, beca
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Seriously? You think they just purchase a random amount of material and see how much they can make out of it?
And no, knowing how much storage you can (or can't) make does NOT equate to business impact. The contaminated material is a supply constraint. The business impact depend of how you respond to that constraint. Do you idle product lines? Do you change your product mix, prioritizing some products over others? Do you adjust prices? Do you add additional suppliers, and how much does that cost? THOS
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Tends to beg the question as to how they know that a massive pile of raw material will make 6.5 exabytes of product, doesn't it?
Most likely using simple math. 2,000 defective chips X 256MB size + 1,000 chips X 128MB size + . . . What they do not know is how many and what size SSDs those chips become that the customer makes: How many 1TB (using 4 x 256MB or 8 X 128 MB) and 512MB (4 x 128MB or 2 X 256MB) , etc.
If you know that much, then you know the actual business impact. You're just not saying it.
That would require the supplier to know exactly what their customer will do with their product. While some customers shares some data with suppliers, they do not always share all data.
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No matter their obligation, Corporate Greed knows damn well the knee-jerk reactions will happen from even vague announcements like this, driving sales with (false?) panic during a time when you can easily drive sales with a little hype and bullshit. No, I'm not saying they would lie about an actual event. I'm saying they might conveniently exaggerate the impact, because it is perfectly acceptable to issue corrections/updates after you enjoy a boost in sales.
Yes because the first panicked thing anyone would do is to buy MORE Western Digital SSDs that do not exist at a higher price. A panicked person would start buying all the Samsung, PNY, Crucial, etc. before they bought WD SSDs.
Makes you wonder who might benefit from manipulation in the (shorts) or long run.
There is manipulation everywhere just like there is conspiracy everywhere if you look for it.
I'm not one of them (Score:2)
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I know this is anecdotal, but since I've started saving my games on tube-based storage devices, my high scores have vastly improved!
Floods, fires, etc. (Score:1)
Another article (Score:2)
Contaminated by what? (Score:2)
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Some employee spilled his coffee...
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sooorry. Mondays.
Re:Contaminated by what? (Score:5, Funny)
What "contaminates" flash storage?
They're integrated circuits. So pretty much anything.
I recall a story about a fab administrator a couple decades back, whose plant had a drastic and persistent bump in defects and a resulting drop in yield. He was being blamed for it, and was near to being fired.
The drop had coincided with the dismissal of the janitorial staff and their replacement by a contracting janitorial service "to save money". One night he watched the clean room cleanup, to see if he could spot anything being done improperly.
Everything was done just fine until lunch. Then the janitors reheated their pizza in the chip ovens.
Good thing I already got my 6.5 exabyte SSD (Score:2)
So far no problems, not even a sneeze.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
6.5 million TB (Score:2)
there would be a shortage of at least 6.5 exabytes in flash storage availability. One exabyte equals one billion gigabytes.
6.5 million terabytes is a much more useful description, given that most storage are sold in TB nowadays.