— I’ve been so busy getting my little movie ready for theaters I’ve hardly had a chance to write. So for a change here’s something not about Steve Jobs.
Thailand is flooded, as we’ve all read, and the Thai hard disk industry has been adversely affected. But for all the doom-and-gloom stories I’ve read so far there hasn’t been much attempt at extrapolating the impact of these events past the basic idea that there will be drive shortages and prices will go up for awhile. The real story is way bigger than that.
The industrial park that’s sitting underwater still in Thailand will be out of action for at least four months, I’m told, and possibly as long as 12 months. And what happens then? Why another monsoon, of course! The flooded industrial park, built in an old rice paddy on a historic flood plain with little added drainage will go under water during the next big storm, too.
The hard disks manufactured in the flooded region are nearly all 3.5-inch drives, so those will be most immediately affected. Since 2.5-inch drives are in ascendancy with 1.8-inch almost out of business and 3.5-inch in decline, the global product mix is likely to change even more, with 3.5-inch drives possibly reaching end-of-life earlier than expected.
But wait, there’s more! Among the Thai plants currently under water is a Western Digital factory that makes 80 percent of hard drive stepper spindle motors in the world. So while the 3.5-inch drive supply will be most immediately affected, 30-60 days later every other type of drive will be in as short supply.
Who are the winners and losers here? The winners are clearly makers of Solid State Drives that have no stepper motors and come nowhere near Thailand. The losers are the hard drive companies, the PC companies like HP, Lenovo, and all the rest that will have to pay higher prices for drives, but especially Intel because that company is a proxy for the PC industry as a whole. If PC sales go down CPU sales will go down too and Intel will be hurt proportionally more than the companies it supplies.
All Intel can do with these lemons, it seems to me, is make lemonade. Intel is in the SSD business already so I’d expect the company to lean on that division to help the company overall. In fact I’d look for Intel to throw lots more money into SSD production, accelerating the trend away from hard drives in order to keep its processor business thriving.
It’s either that or learn to make stepper motors.
Ahh, that’s why HD prices have gone up recently. A few months ago 1 TB SATA drives were around $80-90 and now they are all about twice that. Are there any other reasons, or is it mainly Thailand?
Reminds me of all those years ago when the price of RAM was locked stubbornly at £25-30/Mb for about 3 years in the mid-90’s, apparently because of shortage of supply caused by the Kobe earthquake. Trouble was of course that there’s no substitute for RAM. But wait… there was virtual RAM! I think everyone’s forgotten the meaning of the word SLOW.
It’s actually two things, imho.
Thailand, and speculators.
Once hard drives doubled then tripled in price in less than a week, and seeing early reports that said this would last until June ’12, followed by news that Asus would be out of hard drives at the end of Nov., I reacted.
For my small chain of stores I bought 8 500GB drives for $80 each (full retail price at the large office supply chain). These same drives were priced at my wholesaler for $130 each (and were limited to one drive every 48 hours). I’ve told my team, these are not to be sold as replacement drives, but instead are to be left for system builds.
If someone needs a replacement drive, they can pay current market price.
Hey, this is great news! I updated my NAS from a pair of 1TB HDDs to a pair of 2TB HDDs, but was left with a pair of idle drives sitting on the shelf that I thought were rapidly depreciating to nothingness. I’m going to get them listed on eBay straight away.
Another victory for the free market. It will adapt to change. Not because of any philanthropic leanings, but just due to a profit motive.
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Do you really believe that only the free market can adapt to change (and forced change at that, wich is an effect similar to regulations)?
Societies and the people who make these societies adapt to change regardless of the freedom or even existence of markets.
Hi Ben
State controlled economies do not readily adapt to change because there is no profit motive. Prices are not allowed to signal over supply and/or under supply. Thus, there is no reason for the government to change prices to adapt to new events in the economy.
Thus, the former Soviet Union had prices for goods set by bureaucrats and consequently often had shortages. When the price for a particular item is set too low, nobody wants to produce it. When the wages for workers are set too low, nobody wants to work efficiently. When the idiots in our own government imposed price controls, shortages rapidly developed. Case closed.
I would say that the case has been barely opened. You state that the case is closed because of a single example in all history. But you ignore the people and societies who do have adapted without the need for a market or a free market.
What about adaptation for survival? Does this require a profit motive?
Did the first humans move from deserted lands to richer lands for profit or survival (there was no markets at the time)?
We are currently pushing electric cars in spite of the markets’ desire to keep using fossil fuels, is this push to renewable energy motivated by profit or survival?
If electricity goes out in your home, do you light candles to make a profit or to get light in the room?
And finally, where is this so called free market as any market is influenced by government, environment, culture, resource availability, and many other factors?
Hi Ben
The topic for this Cringely blog was about the shutdown of certain factories in Thailand. This situation involved modern industrialized economies and the expected reaction of other modern industries. Why you decided to discuss primitive societies is beyond me. You certainly have the right to go “off topic” if you want to. However, this type of reply has nothing to do with my postings.
I have no clue about our government’s motives for pushing electric cars. However it is yet to be decided whether this will turn out to be a wise decision or not. When governments decide to impose their decisions on the people, rather than letting the people make their own decisions, things do not always turn out so well.
I decide to light a candle in the dark because it makes sense in an easily understood temporary situation. What does this have to do with reacting to an expected long-term shortage of certain electronic parts?
In the modern industrialized societies, there is a choice between an economy mostly controlled by the producers and the consumers (a free market) and an economy mostly controlled by the government. It is understood by most people that a free market is influenced by government, environment, culture, resource availability, and many other factors. What is your point?
I believe that history has shown the superiority of free markets over government controlled markets. However if some one wants the government to tell them what they must pay and what they can buy, they can always move to those places that have this type of a controlled economy.
This Moorehead person (above and below – reply structure too shallow) sounds like an apologist for decades of free market, corporate greed. Many people who propound such views do so because they also have done well for themselves by stepping on the faces of others. He is both out of step with the times and cannot conceive of a world in which every person’s, every motive is not based on a “profit motive”. Fortunately not everyone is like him. Most people aim to live in a civilised society in which a red in tooth and claw, law of the jungle free market culture has no place. Cooperation will always be more efficient than competition.
Things are changing as demonstrated by the significant increase in anti-capitalist demonstrations. Yesterday I even heard the chairman of Virgin Group say that the cooperate world needs to become a force for good (Why would we ever tolerate it being a force for bad?). I live in hope, not greed! Stage 1 is to realise that the current system is broken. This will provide the impetus for stage 2 – deciding what to replace it with.
Unless people like Moorehead change too, there will be no place for them in our new society.
Charles may have opened an unnecessary can of worms, but he has a point. Government controlled socialism, whether you call it communism, or cooperation has failed every time it’s been tried. Where there is no incentive, there is no progress. That’s why all the sucessful socialist forms of government always include incentives for people to do those things that promote progress. The limited resources of the world can only be divided up by some form of competition. Equality of opportunity is a reasonable goal, not equality in fact. We are constantly seeking the right balance between incentives and giveaways, between too little government and too much.
Hi Ronc
You seem to give such balanced, common sense postings. I almost always agree with them. As for my own postings, I probably deserve to be ridiculed for breaking my vow never to discuss politics or religion. (I have to laugh at Head in the sand. If only he knew how truly evil I can be.)
well said!
Not really. It may turn out to be a victory for Intel, operating in a relatively free market, but it’s at least as great a loss for many others, particluarly those in the industry of making disk drives. Perhaps if Thailand had zoning restrictions that precluded major construction in such a flood zone, than the short sighted desire for instant profit that drove the selection of cheap land near cheap labor might have been overridden. But such regulations just kill business innovation, eh?
But the freedon to be foolish, we’ll never regulate that.
Okay, I have to respond to both the free-market messiahs and the Occupy! crowd who are talking past each other, and more or less missing the whole point of this column.
1) State planning of the whole economy doesn’t seem to work, as the experience in the USSR and Eastern Europe demonstrated very well. Wanna drive a Trabant?
2) Complete laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t work, as demonstrated by the horrific conditions during the early Industrial Revolution. Eight-year-old coal miners in four-foot high mineshafts, anyone?
3) Some parts of the economy do not require government regulation. The growth of the Internet can, in part, be ascribed to its almost total freedom from government regulation. Other parts of the economy NEED regulation, as the 2008 economic meltdown demonstrate. Canada has a very regulated bank and mortgage sector, and we had not a single bank failure following the market crash, and if anything, our real estate market continued to expand in the following years. Canadian banks are now snapping up undervalued foreign competitors all over the world, because our government didn’t allow them to take stupid risks with the shareholders’ and depositors’ money.
4) Government stimulus of industry, government regulation and the occasional direct intervention DO work, and do not necessarily lead down the road hell and socialist stagnation. This has proven particularly true in medium-sized economies like Canada, Australia, Singapore (a bad example for other reasons), where we don’t have the luxury of an enormous domestic pool of capital. Our domestic wheat, chicken and dairy pools have had the effect of, yes, keeping prices high, but on the other hand, we have a somewhat stable agricultural sector not dependent on massive direct handouts and subsidies like the US model. I always laugh when some Americans start railing against government intervention in the economy, but never seem to take into account the trillions of direct subsidies paid to otherwise unviable farmers. Not to mention the quadrillions spent on defence technologies. Companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, United Technologies, United Signal, General Dynamics and on and on would be totally unviable in a truly “free” economy. If they didn’t receive billions in direct federal money in the form of defence contracts — often without open bidding — they simply wouldn’t exist.
Again, no other country on Earth has a military-industrial-complex on the scale of the US, and simply can’t subsidize its aerospace and defence industries in the same way, all the while pretending to have a “free-market” economy.
So wise up, and stop spouting ideological cliches! Life is more complex than that. Live with it!
Yep, global shortages and sky-rocketing prices due to a local event is a big win for the global capitalism, free-market model *rolls eyes*.
This is where our race-to-the-bottom, just-in-time inventory supply, and litigation-enforced elimination of competition (unfair patents etc) system driven by greed takes us.
I suppose the next thing the right-wing ideologues will tell us is that the only way to rebuild the factories in Thailand is with an austerity programme.
Many years ago, I remember saying that someday, a kid would be asking me “Really, Mr. Randolph? You’re so old you remember when computers had moving parts?” I didn’t think it would take this long, though.
Bring on the memristors, already!
-jcr
“Here was the end of an evolution almost as long as Man’s. Its beginnings were lost in the mists of the Dawn Ages, when humanity had first learned the use of power and sent its noisy engines clanking about the world. Steam, water, wind-all had been harnessed for a little while and then abandoned. For centuries the energy of matter had run the world until it too had been superseded, and with each change the old machines were forgotten and new ones took their place. Very slowly, over thousands of years, the ideal of the perfect machine was approached-that ideal which had once been a dream, then a distant prospect, and at last reality: No machine may contain any moving parts.”
“The City and the Stars” (set in the time a billion years from now),
Arthur C. Clarke, 1956
A keyboard has moving parts. So do humans and any “machine” that takes the place of a human. The definition of work is force time distance. If there were no movement there would be no work.
“This long?” What are tablets and smartphones? Chopped liver?
The best ones, in fact, are. Because then you can eat them in a pinch. But the fact that they’re chopped liver means you won’t, unless you’re really really desperate, so it protects your investment.
10 months ago, Bob predicted the end of the 3.5″ drive January (https://www.cringely.com/2011/01/2011-prediction-3-1-8-inch-and-3-5-inch-disk-drives-will-die/) “late in the year” — in other words, now.
Not even close.
I live in Berlin, and prices are currently 3x – 4x what they were 6 months ago. This is hardly a sign of decreasing demand. Fact is, a 500 GB solid state drive now costs just shy of €1400 (over $1800), but even with the current shortage you can buy the same storage as spinning disks for under €50.
Data centers are scrambling and consumers are hungry. Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated.
If Cringely can afford to go 100% solid state, maybe I should consider a career in punditry.
If Bob could predict the future he’d be richer than Buffett. It’s pure speculation, and something to pique our thoughts and stimulate banter amongst those who like to hypothesize over a few suds. I would not take it too seriously.
“I live in Berlin, and prices are currently 3x – 4x what they were 6 months ago. This is hardly a sign of decreasing demand.”
No, it’s almost certainly the effect of the floods in Thailand on prices of HDDs of all sizes. I recently saw a program on German TV that said that the shop price of a typical hard drive had increased by about 500% in the past couple of months.
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
“makes 80 percent of hard drive stepper motors in the world”
Ahem, khm, I think the spindle drive motors are technically called Brushless Direct Current (BLDC) not stepper motors (yes, yes I know… the bills in my wallet – all 3 of them – are faced the same way and sorted numerically, so I must be…). True, they are similar to some extent, but not the same.
Bob, as you undoubtedly know stepper motors were used instead of today’s voice coil drivers to move the HDD heads decades ago.
PS: please give an update about your thin metal platter HDD technology/startup. I would assume this mentioned in an article about HDDs.
PPS: I suppose you know your site was down on Monday for at least several hours?
…And I The maker of the spindle motors in Nidec, not WD. I think every drive I’ve torn apart (hey, those voice coil magnets are incredible) has had a Nidec spindle motor.
I live in Thailand, and the rain (which has stopped now and every day is dry and sunny) has been incredible. Like nothing seen in half a century. But there’s no particular reason to believe that next year will bring the same sort of rains. Any normal or even heavy rainy season here does not result in flooding. And the Thais are hard working and industrious. They will be substantially beefing up flood barriers. There’s no reason at all to believe next year will have these problems.
Obviously this does not mitigate the current problems, but there’s no reason to expect a repeat.
On a lighter note, many of the industrial parks have (pre-flood) promotional signs declaring “guaranteed water!” I imagine those will be coming down soon.
Thanks to climate change, a “once in a century” flood can now happen once every few years or, if you’re unlucky, two years in a row. There’s hardly any part of the planet that hasn’t seen some kind of extreme record-breaking weather in the past few years.
I hope that life is starting to get back to normal for the Thai people. I believe you when you say that Thailand will be building up its flood barriers – the Thais certainly have the ability to do that – but nobody should underestimate the force of nature.
A lot of the water that was once tied up in the form of ice, is now in the form of vapor, tied up in the atmosphere, and when vertical lifting of wind is done, such as when water over oceans travels over hot land in the summer, that air cools as it is lifted and the water condenses from vapor to water molecules and falls out of the atmosphere.
As the icebergs melt, there’s going to be more and more water in the sea, yes, but also in the air, and that means more storms and more heavy storms.
But on the good side, some corporations will have more money than they ever have had. Some will win, some will lose, some will live, some will die: welcome to a brave new world.
“there’s no particular reason to believe that next year will bring the same sort of rains.”
Global Warming. The rains may get worse. More heat means more energy to drive the weather systems and “rare” events will become more frequent.
I see it’s one year later and your silly idea that global warming allows you to predict floods a year in advance seems to have failed.
The obvious question one might ask of anyone living in Thailand is:
Why does the government not do something to reduce the size of Bangkok relative to other cities? Thailand is insanely unbalanced — pretty much EVERYTHING is in Bangkok, with what, Chiang Mai? as the tiny next city.
Even without forcing people to do anything, the government could
– designate another city as the capital and as the provincial capital, and move all government functions out
– implement (perhaps phased in over fifteen years to give people time to adapt) a citywide personal income tax (like NYC) to encourage people who can to leave
– implement, likewise, higher taxes on industry in BKK and/or tax breaks on industries somewhere other than BKK.
The rains are not Thailand’s fault, yes. But putting practically everything of the 20th century in one city — an vastly crowded city, spread over area that’s known to be prone to flooding — WAS Thailand’s choice. There’s still time to change for the future, yet I’ve not seen any discussion on this front.
I don’t doubt that the floods have decimated the production of hard drives but I’m always sceptical about how long term the effects on production are that are caused from a natural disaster, whether flooding, tsunami or earthquake. The manufacters want you to believe that the shortage will last for another year, to encourage you to hurry up and buy or upgrade a computer “while stocks last”.
In the specific case of Thailand, I’d be interested to know if they managed to remove and shift a lot of the production equipment before the floods came. Unlike an earthquake or tsunami, there must have been plenty of warning that the floods would come, especially down-river in Bangkok. If they acted in time, then they should now be able to re-equip many of the factories very quickly.
Not to minimize the tragedy in Thailand, but didn’t we hear the same things after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan earlier this year? We were supposed to have car part shortages, camera prices were supposed to skyrocket, and all electronics in general were supposed to be effected. Those shortages never materialized. Maybe we got distracted by all the media attention the nuclear meltdown was getting, because this hard drive shortage is getting far too much coverage… as a result, customers rushed to Amazon, Newegg, etc and bought up all the hard drives. I tend to agree with what some of you are saying, there is probably some hidden agenda behind this to clear inventory and jack up prices (I operate an IT consulting company, and within a few days after the flood, HP and several distributors were already sending emails declaring a shortage). I just have a hard time believing an industry this large can be brought to it’s knees by a flood.
It may not have hit the US, but Australia saw distinct shortages in Japanese-made airconditioning units. Retailers traditionally try to kick start the seasonal by offering cheap installation / some other offer, but didn’t this year because they couldn’t guarantee the stock would be available.
There may have been other shortages, but I can’t comment on them directly.
Now is a good time to take advantage of the supply chain lag in the B&M stores like Best Buy and Office Depot. They are still selling 1 TB drives under $100 as of the past weekend.
You’re already too late. I had bought 2TB drives at Fry’s for $70 a couple months before the flooding!
I guess I picked a bad time to switch my backups from tape to HD. Sheesh, my costs have more than doubled.
For bonus points who can name the IBM system that is entirely hardware independent because it’s creator didn’t think “spinning platters of rust” would last as storage devices (and thus didn’t want his system to be locked in to a specific technology).
Define “hardware independent”.
Ability to port, without any modifications, the operating system and all applications to virtually any hardware architecture (as has been done numerous times in this systems lifespan).
As a bonus of this system’s unique design it features single-level storage. Meaning, the operating system and all the applications (and the objects with which they interact) all reside in a very large virtualized, single-level storage. That is, the entire system, including the objects most other systems distinguish as “on disk” or “in memory” are all in the single-level storage.
BobsKnob,
OK, it’s been a week. Nobody has any guesses, so let’s have it. What system are you using that’s hardware independant?
Thanks,
Derek
Sounds like OS/360.
AS/400 (TIMI) rather than OS/360. OS/360 running on various hardware emulating a system/360 was probably not intentional enough.
FYI, I just tried to share this article on Facebook and what ended up being shared were the ads. Couldn’t cycle through to the actual article.
Global Warming = More Floods in Thailand ? Just asking . . .
I always knew SSD ( flash media) drives would be the way to go. Maybe Mother nature agrees now, too. But why stop there?
Why not Solid State Servers (SSS)? Google builds and deploys a butt-load of servers every day: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html. They’re already obsolete.
The way I see it, the future of cloud computing (which scares the livin’ crap out of me – as in- “where the hell is my data”) – is in SSS.
Makes ya wanna invest in SanDisk, doesn’t it!
Thailand’s industrial parks are almost all in the Bangkok metro area, and almost every facility I have ever visited is bare meters above sea level.
Bangkok is a decent place for a facility, and the workforce is very good, and the quality of the products coming from our Thai operations usually equaled or exceeded the Chinese operations, but Bangkok seems to be at capacity for industrial parks.
I have often thought that the company who pioneers a facility in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Udon Thani, or some other major Thai city would benefit from the same sort of human resource availability that the Suzhou, China early adopters received.
That benefit is the opportunity to attract engineers and technicians with young families who don’t want to live in the Big Smoke with all its attendant hassles. This would be coupled with the ability to build greenfield facilities somewhere other than rice padi. And finally, less competition for workforce resources, and possibly overall lower costs for overall operations.
Both Seagate and Western Digital have HDD factories in Malaysia that can be ramped back up, although we may see a delay in availability of the 4-5TB 3.5″ drives that were planned for first and second quarter of next year. Looks like Samsung got out of the business a bit too soon. And Intel is getting back into the RAM business, so expect some new products from them to take advantage of the HDD shortage.
Wow. Think about all of the devices I have that depend upon those drives: My iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook Air…
I remember long ago (back in the late 1990s) a Iomega investors bulletin board. Iomega was having some hard times and their stock was at $7/share. However, the posters on this board were bullish. Iomega’s Zip disk was a must have accessory! They’ll come up with an even better model and that will become the must have accessory on all computers!
A lone poster told everyone that they were stupid. Those little solid state USB drives were just coming out. At that time, they had a maximum capacity of about 128Mb and were a lot of money. This person told us that these USB drives would make the Zip drive obsolete. These USB drives would increase in size to 512Mb, maybe even more and the cost would drop. There was no way Iomega could ever keep up in capacity or costs.
In fact, the poster even predicted that the floppy drive would go away — unneeded because software would be on CDs and small USB drives would be so cheap that they’d just be passed back and forth between people with the files they need.
Talk about obsolescence and cluelessness…
Steve Balmer: “We always will be in a Windows era!”
https://www.electronista.com/articles/11/11/15/microsoft.ceo.shrugs.off.threat.to.windows/
All he means is that computers and the need for software to run them will not go away. Windows 8, due to arrive next year, will include a brand new component called Windows Run Time (WinRT) in addition to the current OS capabilities to handle both the newer power efficient apps as well as all the legacy apps. Check out WinRT here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime
Apple’s desktops and notebooks have hard disks obviously. So do a few iPods. At last check the iPhones and iPads do not. While we don’t know the full purpose of the giant data center Apple built. (see: https://www.cringely.com/2011/06/have-you-heard-the-one-about-apples-data-center/ ) One likely use is the storage of personal data for Apple’s products.
Forget about Steve Balmer. In Isaacson’s book, page 408, Steve Jobs said: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” When you have large well divided companies with each division managing its own P&L, it is hard for the whole company to work as a team. It is hard for them to make the hard decisions, to compromise, to hurt one part for the betterment of the whole. This is one reason Microsoft has been stuck in the mud and Apple is not.
MacBook Airs are now SSD only and iMacs have the option (expensive) to have SSD (and HDD). Next Springs MacBook Pros will very likely be SSD as well (more MacBook Air like) given the enormous success of the latest generation of MBAs. Apple is certainly moving away from HDD as are other companies. That’s one advantage of cloud-based data storage – although this really just means a shift from consumer bought HDD to corporate owned HDD.
Yeah, I purposefully specified the devices that don’t contain hard drives. Apple still uses hard drives in many of their products.
SSDs have been around a long time and people kept saying that the hard drive is dead. However, for the last decade, hard drives ran ahead of SSDs by getting bigger and cheaper faster than the SSD technology could.
Things are changing. A few years ago, the MacBook Air came with a hard drive as standard. Now, it’s SSD. iPods originally came with hard drives, but then Apple started putting in SSDs in the lower capacity ones, and now the only one with a hard drive is the super sized 160Gb Classic. The iPhone and iPad only have SSD. Geeks are replacing their hard drives in their PCs with SSDs. The SSDs have started replacing the hard drive.
The flood in Thailand may finally be the death nell for the standard hard drive. This year, the price won’t drop, but SSD technology will continue to improve. 120Gb SSD is under $200. Next year, the 256Gb will become the under $200 standard, and that’s big enough to replace laptop drives. Desktops may still use hard drives for another year or two, but even they will switch to SSDs.
Many years ago I was asked to lead a project to build an electronics plant in S. Korea. The plant site was on the bank of a river in the middle of some rice patties. To anyone with half a brain the first and most obvious question is “what about floods?” We were ASSURED “Oh it never floods there. We have river data all the way back to 1956. (After the Korean War)” I looked at our engineering managers and gave them the look “are you buying this?” They were.
A few months later we got word — the site was under water. (Duh!)
A few months later our Korean contractor had hundreds of workers carrying in soil. They wore lead boots to pack down the fill.
The soil along river banks is often made of silt and sediment. It is not very good for building foundations. Fill soil packed down by workers with lead boots is not very good for building foundations either.
We then proceeded with a plan to use a pile type of foundation. Our structural engineers figured out where to put the piles and changed the design of the foundation. “Whoa — stop — we’re sticking with the original design” our managers told us. Our Korean partner has ASSURED us we just need a basic concrete slab. “Are you still buying this?” Yes they were.
Before we finished building the place, the foundation was breaking and parts of the building started leaning. Structurally the building was a disaster and it looked like crap.
Because we wiped out many engineering departments in the 1980’s and 1990’s and didn’t replace them for a decade, there is now an experience gap. The new engineers do not have the benefit of learning from the preceding generation. As we move more and more work off shore, we lose a lot of knowledge and experience. Due to the experience gap we are now destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. The flooding of the hard disk plant in Thailand is the latest example.
This is not to say there are not good engineers in Thailand and elsewhere. There are. There is more to engineering than what one gets in school. A lot of it comes from experience and from working with other more experienced engineers. When you get into areas of reliability and safety it is easy for an inexperienced engineer to overlook things.
There are many things that lead to engineering failures. A couple of them are inexperience and management denial. Another is putting all your eggs in one basket. We will soon be facing a global shortage of hard disks because of these issues.
there will NEVER be a shortage of self-important idiots who think sheer will and bluster can overpower physics and nature.
/applause
I want to use that as my sig, if I thought it wouldn’t get me in trouble.
Like one poster wrote the other day: You don’t read this blog for the articles –
you read it for the comments. Thx for sharing an insider’s view with us …
I mostly agree, but it’s 50/50. I’m a huge fan of the Cringe, but the the Tribe is an essential part, and I love the comments just as much. Synergy.
Story sounds familiar … hummmmm
Fukushima! And the detailed tsunami records go back to … the dawn of time on that island … not just until after the Korean War. :^)
Yeap. And I can remember the first time I did work on a chemical plant on the Gulf coast. First – all buildings and structures had to be designed to with stand a direct hit of an F5 hurricane. Next – nothing important could be at ground level. Everything was to be located above the worst case tidal surge. This included all electrical equipment. Next – the plant had to be power self sufficient. It had enough on-site power generation to keep operating for weeks. The generators were also located above any potential tidal surge.
The company rules were specific. The plant had to be able to survive the worst conditions mother nature could throw at it. Over the years I saw several hurricanes hit our plants. In all cases the plants would be shutdown several hours before the storm. In all cases the plants would be back online within a day or two of the storm clearing the area.
Chemical and petroleum plants use a lot of dangerous materials. When a storm hits it is important the staff has control of the operation. If for example a tornado swept through the plant and damaged a storage tank. The plant staff would be able to pump the material out of the damaged tank and into another.
This experience gap exists in the USA too. I was dumb founded when Hurricane Rita took out several refineries. Subsequent storms have taken out other refineries. I was surprised to learn several refineries no longer have the ability to produce their own electricity. If they lose the utility feed, they go offline. Guess what happens to one’s electric utility during a hurricane? Standard practices that have been used by the industry for decades have been forgotten. Those practices were written to protect the Billions USD of investment, the lives of the workers, and the safety of the surrounding community. If the refineries can’t produce their own electricity, it makes one wonder what other standards are being ignored.
Today every time the wind kicks up along the Gulf Coast, we all pay for it in our gasoline prices.
The second oldest profession is conning foreigners. Your company and the hard drive companies got suckered, plain and simple. You got sold a bunch of worthless swamp land because you (management) didn’t do your homework, and instead relied on your “local partner”.
Hey MarkBob!
Saw you on Scottie McGrew’s Press:Here on Sunday AM via DVR. You gotta love Scottie’s program, where he can sell only two measly Chevron commercials, and loads up a bunch of filler promos. Enjoyed your local appearance.
We’re looking forward to putting some moola in your pocket via Landmark Palo Alto, or wherever. Good Luck! Anybody dealing with Mark Cuban needs it!
Regarding your Thai comments, it’s the same old story for USA companies… Live by outsourcing… Die by outsourcing! No trend lasts forever, and what goes around, comes around.
See you around town in Santa Rosa! Welcome back!
StatMan
San Jose, California, USA
Hey, that’s MY nickname for you know who!
From Seagate Partner Communication:
With regard to Seagate business operations in Thailand, our component and drive assembly factories are operational and accessible. Our production is not constrained by either internal component supply or by our ability to assemble finished products. Rather, we are constrained by the availability of specific externally sourced components. Seagate now expects to ship 41 million to 45 million hard drives in the current quarter, a change from the prior projection of 40 million to 50 million units.
Throughout the entire industry, demand will significantly outstrip supply at least for the December quarter and the supply disruption will continue for multiple quarters. Unconstrained demand was expected to be approximately 180 million units for the December 2011 quarter. It is now expected that industry shipments will be limited to approximately 110 to 120 million units.
As such, our business priorities are focused on supporting our external component suppliers’ efforts to rebuild the supply chain as quickly as possible, and to work with customers to strategically align their near- and long-term requirements to our production capability. We are aligning our production schedules and product builds to best support both our suppliers and our customers. Our product roadmap has not changed. Continue to refer to the SPP Partner Portal for the most recent roadmap.
I believe that’s MBA-speak for “don’t blame us, blame our contractors.”
Which also begs the question: who chose the contractor model?
This will be disastrous for Intel. Putting an SSD into a PC is similar to skipping a couple of CPU generations ahead if not more. I put an SSD in my 2007 Mac Pro last year and since then have lost all interest in a new “faster” computer.
I believe you are correct.
I had a customer come in yesterday looking to either upgrade their machine or buy a new one.
She’s a photographer with some 5GB of external storage.
She was asking for a 2TB hard drive in her new system. As the boot drive.
I am opposed to such large drives for boot drives. Slows things down too much.
Instead I offered her a 120GB SSD for the same price. I educated her on the speed and mechanical advantages, and she’s agreed.
I have a 120GB SSD in the computer I’m writing this on.
Reboot? <12 seconds from "Restart" to operational desktop.
Install Win 7? 10 minutes.
I don't have any data on an SSD in an older system, but I'm sure it would a huge kick in the @$$.
as stated…”The flooded industrial park, built in an old rice paddy on a historic flood plain with little added drainage will go under water during the next big storm, too.”
Why??? Why would they build a plant on a site that historically floods? Why build on a flood plain? If this is true, does it flood every year? If so, why is this year any different then? Why do I feel that this is just one more excuse to move SSD technology and prematurely retire old technology?
Why? Because people believe they are infallible and can save money. The construction industry is focused on speed and efficiency – for their construction. Toronto, Ontario has the highest number of glass walled condo towers in North America. We have hot summers and freezing winters. In the summer these buildings ost a fortune to keep cool and in the winter a fortune to heat. Glass is a terrible insulator, even triple glazing is worse than brick. The glass walls cannot be easily repaired and tend to loose transparency over time. But they look great and are cheap to build. Who pays for this short-sighted ness? The condo owners – through increased utilities and decreased value of the condo as awareness of the problems increases. There are many examples of this short-term thinking in construction.
Expect the OEMs to get the hard drives first, and then only later for retail outlets. Those shortages will drive up prices, as we’ve already seen in the UK. Although if you buy an external hard drive they’re still reasonable! I use these for backups.
OEMs will get them first because they’ll be supply contracts in place. It means that PC sales won’t be as affected as perhaps it should be if the available drives were shared out as previously.
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As long as any resulting demand does not raise SSD prices higher then they already are.
On the other hand of SSD drives started to fly off the shelf and demand was not an issue it might result in prices for those coming down sooner then later and that wold rock.
Guess we have to wait and see.
Most likely, demand will grow as vendors snap up SSDs in place of HDs, SSD prices will spike, production will ramp up and eventually we’ll see cheaper SSDs. No idea when “eventually” will happen, maybe can Cringe can predict that for us!
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear words/phrases like “free market” “competitveness” and so on. One just needs to look at the “who/how/what” that caused our current recession or is it depresssion (which is along way from over,)
Just read the standard newspapers and it’s easy to notice that many (most?) large corporations/businesses are in fact anti-competitive as well as “anti-free market”. if anything it’s the reverse of what CEOs preach; these CEOs love “corporate communism”, whereby all kinds of middle class tax dollars are dumped into the above misguided corporations as forgivable loans,or grants or loans with so little interest that it’s laughable.
So… I won’t be surpised if hundreds or is it thousands of profiteers jump all over the shortage of hard drives; these jackals are always around, ready to pounce.
“Hitachi-LG Data Storage, a joint venture of Hitachi Ltd and LG Electronics pleaded guilty to 15 criminal counts in connection with a long-running probe of price fixing in the sale of optical disk drives to companies including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft. Hitachi-LG Data Storage Inc is the first company charged by US prosecutors in the investigation.District Judge Richard Seeborg accepted the plea from the company on Tuesday at a hearing in San Francisco. Seeborg sentenced the company to a $21.1m fine.
Cristina Arguedas, an attorney for the company, declined to comment after the hearing.Major companies including Sony, Hitachi and Toshiba disclosed in 2009 that they had received subpoenas from the Justice Department related to the investigation of sales of disk drives, such as CD, DVD and Blu-ray players.” https://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/09/nvidia-hitachi-africa?newsfeed=true
And, to comment directly on the subject of Bob’s column:
Doesn’t this prove how dangerous it is to over-concentrate production in a single factory in a single location? In a sense, we’re lucky that fate disabled a plant producing a technology in its twilight. But what if a natural disaster had befallen the single plant producing 80% of the chips for solid-state drives? That could have happened just as easily, and might have disrupted the natural switchover in progress, no?
Remember how people laughed when little boy Anakin Skywalker took out the single droid control ship in The Phantom Menace? “Who would ever come up with a design like that where you’d have a single point of failure?”
Well, now we know.
I’m still using an old seagate harddrive built in 2002, hoping that it won’t die anytime soon ;). However, if it does i won’t switch to these SSD drives, i would rather tend to take an ordinary 3.5 inch harddrive.
HI
don’t know if you will see this, but the recent Steve Jobs PBS doc you refer to SJ ‘reforming’ 4 industries while Edison only reformed 3, including electric power.
I would remind you that the world does not use DC power as Edison promoted, somewhat irrationally (electrocuting an elephant as I recall), but AC as invented, or at least invigorated, by Nicoli Tesla (and partially stolen from him by Edison)
Scott scott@dnasilicon.com
Sounds to me like an opportunity for any other company making stepper motors to make a bid for a huge market. HDD’s aren’t the only things with these motors. Sure this will give SSD an advantage- and you can be sure SSD companies will use it, but just because one factory goes underwater that doesn’t mean a product ceases to exist. Who is making the other 20%, Bob?
What’s the difference between an HDD spindle motor and a DVD spindle motor (apart from speed)? Impossible to manufacture at the same facility?
If only I knew which company would bid for this I’d be looking for stock in it. Prices are probably rising as we think about it.
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Intel is fit to be Thai’d – Cringely on technology[…]…
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Bob,
Look at today’s news. Intel revised revenue #s and stock down by 5%.!! Thai flood’s effect is being realized.
Nikul
Another correct prediction for Mr Cringely!
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Mr. Cringely, what about the light weight, flexible, high performance, low power consumption platter hard drives that you were talking about some years ago, will they ever come to market?
Some people call them foil disk drives.
October 26, 2006 ; Bob’s Disk Drive
https://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061026_001143.html
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