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First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales

44 points by _tk_ ago | 33 comments

tombert |next [-]

I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night.

One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.

I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.

[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.

ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.

dspillett |root |parent |next [-]

I have a home array too, though based on 4Tb drives (6x, two lots of RAID10, one 3x4T one 3x6T, linked as an LVM volume as I extended it by adding the second array some time ago).

I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…

hirako2000 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

also bought a handful of 14 to 16tb drives. They sold for such a low price last year I thought it can't be wrong to grab them.

It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.

Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?

walterbell |root |parent |next [-]

GenAI and/or smart glasses video? WD already sold their entire 2026 production of nearline drives for data centers.

tombert |root |parent |previous [-]

Yeah I have no idea the direct cause. I didn't think that the SATA controllers for a hard drive took that much.

It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.

bluerooibos |root |parent |previous [-]

Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.

tombert |root |parent [-]

As I said, they were used, so I knew that a drive breaking was kind of an inevitability. As far as I'm aware there's no warranty, I certainly didn't pay for an extended one.

Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.

profsummergig |next |previous [-]

Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first facility to begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? And just an assembly and testing facility? To me that seemed like an easy cop-out. To me (my admittedly naive self), wafer fabs and CPUs seemed like the real game.

Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now).

Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.

ufmace |root |parent |next [-]

I would think if you're a developing country looking to build some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd probably be best to start with something on the easier side. Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can still be sold on the open market.

il |next |previous [-]

Why isn't production scaling to meet demand? Shouldn't the market address this.

dspillett |root |parent |next [-]

Production was close to maximum anyway because of existing demand and how expensive new fabs are to bring up. The boom in AI use wasn't sufficiently planned for as it wasn't expected at the scale we are seeing, so to scale up means building more fabs - a long and expensive task. The situation is not helped by one of the AI companies successfully negotiating huge deals for a year worth of production with the two biggest providers at the same time and keeping it secret enough that neither bumped up prices in the deal as a result of knowing what the play was.

miki123211 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Because:

1. Factories take time to build.

2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now.

3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years.

4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.

eschneider |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.

sosborn |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.

pfortuny |root |parent |next |previous [-]

It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.

helterskelter |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Building these factories goes way beyond "nontrivial". We may see a few come online in a couple of years though, but time will tell if the extra capacity alleviates the crunch.

littlecranky67 |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Because the manufacturers of storage (and RAM) consider it to be an AI bubble, too. The surge in demand is a short burst, not a sustained one. Hence it makes no sense to throw a whole lot of ressources into scaling up production, when the demand won't be there anymore in 1-2 years when the factories will be ready.

smallerize |root |parent |next |previous [-]

A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.

analognoise |root |parent [-]

Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.

dspillett |root |parent |next [-]

Who is going to pay for a non-cutting-edge fab that might be completely out of date relatively soon though?

Imustaskforhelp |root |parent |previous [-]

Shouldn't countries wanting sovereign infrastructure create subsidies for creation of factories/job creation and also selling first/primarily within the region if it might cost on just a few million dollars (preferably a new competitor)

I think one flaw in my thinking could be that there might be a lack of experience within the people for something like this, do you consider it to be a factor and would it be difficult to hire people relevant to such fab?

pjc50 |root |parent |next [-]

> just a few million dollars

TSMC Arizona projected investment is $165 billion. Not millions. And yes apparently hiring the right staff has been one of the issues.

People really underestimate the work of Maurice Chang.

spencerflem |root |parent |previous [-]

USA tried this with the CHIPS act

downrightmike |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Free markets, yes

cyanydeez |root |parent |previous [-]

Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?

FpUser |root |parent [-]

Because it operates exactly as a drug dealer. It gives you first shot for free (reasonable opportunity to move up) and after you are hooked it makes sure that it extracts all your money (subscription and inability to own anything).

red_admiral |next |previous [-]

Guess I'll find the old ones at the back of my cupboard for the time being ... oh wait. A 16MB SD card. Those were the days.

jbverschoor |root |parent [-]

Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards

whatever1 |previous [-]

Who cares guys, soon food shortages will start. In Europe they started rationing fuels. In Australia gas stations are out of diesel.

We are trully doomed.

baxtr |root |parent |next [-]

A bit tangential: it’s narratives like this which can create sudden crashes on the stock market.

hall0ween |root |parent |previous [-]

far be it for me to question your prophetic capacities. i wonder, do you have any historical examples or logic-based arguments that our doom of nigh?

xbmcuser |root |parent [-]

Oil (diesel), gas and fertilizer is the backbone of the worlds agriculture. With shortages of all 3 the food production goes down dramatically. Even if the war ends today it will take years to bring back production to previous levels. In my opinion the effects will start showing up in food prices in the next few weeks once food producing countries realize the food shortages could happen they will start restricting exports.