WD Resumes HDD Production at Just One Factory

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Still waiting for a 100 bucks 160-250Gb SSD or an 70 bucks 2TB HDD i still got 200gb on my 1Tb drive and another 150 on my 500gb Main drive but comon is an Caviar Blue Sata III and the 1tb is a Samsung Sata II very slow xD...
 
Brackish water=corrosive liquid

Corrosive liquid+equipments that are so sensitive that a few dust particles would bring production to a halt=...

A really expensive and long repair. I wonder how long would it take for hard drive production to return to normal.
 
[citation][nom]Marcus Yam[/nom]Right, because no natural disasters happen in the U.S.?That point aside, prices of hard drives produced domestically would be even higher than they are right now.[/citation]

Marcus is right. Even US nuclear plants were flooded this summer. There is no perfect geo location.
 
anybody who didn't bite on an SSD on black friday when most were at a 1:1 cost to storage ratio is, in my humble opinion, a fool.

A 120, much moreso a 240, should be more than enough storage space for somebody who properly manages their data and doesn't store HD movies or pics on their drive.
 
[citation][nom]drapacioli[/nom]Too late WD, I bought a 120GB OCZ Solid State Drive when my system drive failed and I'm not going back. My 2TB external drive from last year (2TB WD MyBook Essential purchased at a price of $69.99!) will be run into the ground before I buy another hard drive.[/citation]
WD start the game, now they will pay for it 😀
 
[citation][nom]internetlad[/nom]anybody who didn't bite on an SSD on black friday when most were at a 1:1 cost to storage ratio is, in my humble opinion, a fool.A 120, much moreso a 240, should be more than enough storage space for somebody who properly manages their data and doesn't store HD movies or pics on their drive.[/citation]

You know, I bought a SSD on black friday because that is when my drive happened to go out (just my luck right?). Anyway I paid almost $200 for my OCZ drive because there were no local deals, and I go back to the same store today and it's half off. I mean really? Sometimes you just can't win even if you do hunt for the deals.
 
I think that it is better that the production is from one area. If the production was from multiple places the quality of the same model drives might vary drastically between production facility's. when the company manages one large site you can expect them to hold quality to a higher degree, and with hardisk drives, isn't a long lasting quality product the most important thing?
 
[citation][nom]bin1127[/nom]Marcus is right. Even US nuclear plants were flooded this summer. There is no perfect geo location.[/citation]
Yet at the same time, it's unwise to cluster all of your production facilities in one small area, and then not equip such facilities with defensive measures against local natural disasters.

It's like building all of your SSD production facilities right next to the Mississippi River, and then provide inadequate flood controls.
 
20 years ago there was a fire in a memory plant in Japan and the RAM price skyrocketed like crazy until more companies decided to open plants a little bit all over the world, and we never found again expensive memories, the price kept going down and down because it allowed companies to launch themselves on a market with a strong demand because there was no risk of competition and ROI were high enough. Similarly the situation for pricey hard-drives might come to a near end because the demanding market is going to create opportunities, but it's not going to happen overnight. I read that some people would prefer to buy SSD's instead, but it won't curb down the price in hard-drives. Competition has to be created within the product. One of the reasons comes from the fact that if integrators don't get their hard-drives cheap they won't be able to sell any desktop, we would find ourselves with prices from the 90s.

Also on the market, there are already integrators that change their strategy and stopped selling hard-drives to their customers so that they can focus more on a complete product offer and can honor their maintenance contract with their partners, but there are not very far right now from not fulfilling their contract due to the shortage of hard-drives. It might be very possible that within a few months, we'll see less innovative products on the market if nobody reverses the shortage situation, and i doubt that people will pay an extra $400 to buy a product with an SSD inside with less capacity given the situation of our economic recession.



 
[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]Gotta thank the 10 Japanese pump trucks that have been sent to Thailand to help out with these companies.[/citation]
Hopefully they aren't the ones used on the reactor....
 
[citation][nom]sublime2k[/nom]a) No place on Earth is safe from natural disasters.[/citation]
Completely safe is impossible, but you can can minimize the losses by doing a research around the globe.
Like the old tectonic plates in south america, middle Brazil never had an Earthquake recorded in any magnitude, they also don't have hurricanes or flooding on the countryside and the land is located above 1500 ft, lots of safe terrain to build your expensive and delicate factory IMHO.
 
Hmm.. That's just brilliant disaster planning from Western Digital. Throw all of your factories in one locale with a wishful thought: 'hope nothing happens'. They were saving all kinds of money with cheap labor. Now they want the consumers to pay for their mistake by jacking up the price to cover their error. Nice. What happened to all that money they were saving? They should use some of it to offset the increased prices.
 
The cost of Gas at the pump has remained high despite the rise and fall of the cost of a barrel of oil on the stock exchanges. And like oil, the cost of HDDs will not drop any time soon either... the companies (Seagate, WD, Hitachi, etc...) will want to recover lost profits for their stock holders, by maintaining these larger profit margins for a while. This is the way the world turns folks, and we will pay for it for the next couple of years before we see the cost of harddrives where they used to be three months ago.
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]Brackish water=corrosive liquidCorrosive liquid+equipments that are so sensitive that a few dust particles would bring production to a halt=...A really expensive and long repair. I wonder how long would it take for hard drive production to return to normal.[/citation]

My guess it could be well over a year before prices and production comes back to normal in not longer. They should have had plants in China, South Korea, even the US that could have helped production in situations like this.
 
[citation][nom]A Bad Day[/nom]Yet at the same time, it's unwise to cluster all of your production facilities in one small area, and then not equip such facilities with defensive measures against local natural disasters.It's like building all of your SSD production facilities right next to the Mississippi River, and then provide inadequate flood controls.[/citation]

You mean like building your nuclear plant right next to the ocean on a country that's prone to tsunamis and typhoons?
 
Was planning on buying an HDD this yr, until I found the 1TB WD I bought 2 years ago for $80 is now $115.

Seems like most of us consumers will be holding back, but manufacturers probably have a larger share of the market than us.

Hopefully, they'll learn to spread their resources over at least a couple more countries, but somehow I think they'll dismiss it as a rare event and go on as if nothing happened.
 
Pity they can't sue the US for likely causing it or exacerbating it? (most of the excess carbon up there is made in the USA even though it's well under 1/2 the output).

Although, Pakistan should get the first US payout.

i.e US stop pissing carbon on the world - and don't blame China when it has 1/4 of your per-capita output.
 
[citation][nom]doorspawn[/nom]Pity they can't sue the US for likely causing it or exacerbating it? (most of the excess carbon up there is made in the USA even though it's well under 1/2 the output).Although, Pakistan should get the first US payout.i.e US stop pissing carbon on the world - and don't blame China when it has 1/4 of your per-capita output.[/citation]

When it comes to carbon output, Republicans are anything but conservative.
 
[citation][nom]nezzymighty[/nom]The cost of Gas at the pump has remained high despite the rise and fall of the cost of a barrel of oil on the stock exchanges. And like oil, the cost of HDDs will not drop any time soon either... the companies (Seagate, WD, Hitachi, etc...) will want to recover lost profits for their stock holders, by maintaining these larger profit margins for a while. This is the way the world turns folks, and we will pay for it for the next couple of years before we see the cost of harddrives where they used to be three months ago.[/citation]

+1. Also the Thailand factories weren't churning out hard drives on a 1 for 1 "you buy one, we ship one" ratio. These companies have stock piles of drives that will surely last until the factories are running again. The price gouging is simply exploitation of consumer fear. Case and point, why havent external harddrives (which use the exact same internal drives) risen 150% in price as well?

Speculation is truely the mother of all evil.
 
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