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Western Digital says contamination impacting production at Japanese facilities
- tentacleuno 5y agoWas it a fly[0], by any chance? [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rUEJwsXbnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rUEJwsXbnk
- taneq 5y agoYou wouldn't think they'd ship buggy hard drives, would you?
- tentacleuno 5y agoI never really think about it, although I imagine the chip shortage is putting a big dent in the production of HDD's / SSD's.
- nitred 5y agoDoes anyone know what kind of products this kind of flash storage is used in? SSDs or NVMe SSD or something else?
- 3np 5y agoIn general Kioxia are making SSDs (NVME and otherwise) as well as USB drives and SD cards. I'm guessing this affects the whole range.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 5y ago> said they’re working to get the plants in Yokkaichi and Kitakami back to normal operations as quickly as possible. > Kioxia said its newer and more lucrative type of 3D flash was the product line impacted, and “the company does not anticipate that shipment of its conventional 2D NAND flash memory will be affected.” Reads like NAND chips marketed as Kioxia BiCS4. 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/western-digital-kioxia-say-contamination-hurt-chip-production https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/western-d...
- xenadu02 5y agoEverything that uses NAND flash, which ranges from computers to phones to TVs. WD and Kioxia supply chips to the commodity market, not just for their own branded products. For example 40% of "Brand X" SSD drives might have WD chips, 40% Toshiba chips, and 20% Samsung chips so the manufacturer can get a better price and/or diversify supply. If WD can only supply 25% next quarter orders to Toshiba and Samsung will increase. That will naturally push prices up to some degree.
- wronglebowski 5y agoWhat does contamination even mean in this context?
- andyjohnson0 5y agoImpurities in raw materials?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andi999 5y agomaybe dust?
- MisterTea 5y agoFOD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage Working in Communications/Medical/Aerospace manufacturing, this is a MASSIVE concern.
- usr1106 5y agoExactly. Pretty poor news article not addressing this. At least they could have added "The manufacturer declined to comment on how the contamination occured" if that's the case. Poor manufacturing process? (Of course poor is relative in today's silicon) Sabotage? Earthquake? (They have them all the time) Radiation from Fukushima? (Maybe a bit late 10 years after)
- 5y ago
- maccam912 5y ago6.5 exabytes short? It sounds like a lot, but does someone more informed know if that is going to make a dent?
- zinekeller 5y ago6.5 million in equivalent 1-terabyte units (note that NAND chips tend to be 64-512GB, the unit is just to illustrate approximate loss). However, I'm reading it beyond the 6.5 exabytes since that the WD press release (or any Kioxia statement) did not state that the production has been resumed, so I'm assuming it's actually a downtime and not just bad chips.
- jeffbee 5y agoGlobal flash shipments last year were estimated to be ~600EB, so that is ~1%.
- gene-h 5y agoHigh tech electronics can be quite sensitive to small contaminants in manufacturing equipment. A plant making HDDs accidentally lubricated some of the machinery with silicone which turned out to be very bad. This silicone got into the disks and as the head passed over the disk it got hot enough to decompose the silicone oil into silica. So effectively, the hard drive disk got covered in sand and caused the hard drives to fail much faster. The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped. I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.
- blockwriter 5y agoScrapped or scraped? Did they really need to abandon the plant or the equipment, or just clean it?
- totalZero 5y agoSilicone oil is one of the most stubborn contaminants I have ever encountered. I use trisodium phosphate to clean it up, and even then it sometimes persists. Try pouring epoxy over wood that has been polished with Pledge, and you'll see what I mean. I can believe "scrapped."
- sitkack 5y agoIsn’t a silicone based oil used in oil diffusion vacuum pumps? Seems like one should look for a different solution
- bell-cot 5y agoReminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line / formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.
- jdrc 5y agoWith all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is not as big problem as rumored?
- jeromegv 5y agoIt's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.
- kataklasm 5y agoHow exactly does your old laptop have anything to do with a global shortage?
- gambiting 5y agoI haven't been to the hospital in years, so clearly the news about long wait times at the ER are bogus.
- jdrc 5y agoWell a lot of the demand that creates this shortage is for replacement of 'old' phones or laptops which are not truly old
- yourusername 5y agoThere are multiple shortages going on. For leading edge chips going into phones and GPU's maybe we wait for our game console or new phone a few months. But there are also shortages for automotive sensors, microcontrollers, power delivery controllers. Not buying a new phone isn't going to solve the IC shortage for cars or white goods.
- zinekeller 5y agoThe short explanation is that phone and computer chips are incompatible with cars (except in Tesla cars where they do use some, and even then Tesla cars still use chips that are literally have no comparison with computer chips). The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoWhat a happy coincidence. Just as prices of flash memory have stabilized. Manufacturers of commodity parts like storage or LCD panels are infamous for price fixing and gouging. All the disasters are great excuse for unjustified price hikes. I remember how a decade ago I was building my PC and HDD prices were painful.
- oynqr 5y agoThat was because of floods, right?
- Shadonototra 5y agoyeah, building plants in regions with high seismic activity and high flooding potential was for sure the best idea of the century now let's build our new plants in LA, that'll help a lot in the future :D dumb western politicians are responsible of the current situation, shame on them for sacrificingmany generations of future asian-dependent citizens
- Scoundreller 5y agoIntel is making the right choice with a fab in ohio. So boring, people cannot find it on a map.
- Shadonototra 5y agoyou don't look at the global picture, this explains your situation in the west https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/01/22/intels-silicon-valley-plant-closure-signals-end-of-era/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/01/22/intels-silicon-valley...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kragen 5y agohttps://archive.fo/MQrpR https://archive.fo/MQrpR
- RadixDLT 5y agois this done on purpose?
- oivey 5y agoWhy would it be? If it drives up prices, WD is less able to capture that price increase due to production losses than its competitors.
- 627467 5y agoWas i the only one expecting to read what was actually the contaminant?