Western Digital's Flash Memory Factory Contaminated—6.5 Exabytes Lost

[btarunr]

Western Digital Corp. (Nasdaq: WDC) today announced that contamination of certain material used in its manufacturing processes has occurred and is affecting production operations at both its Yokkaichi and Kitakami joint venture, flash fabrication facilities. Western Digital's current assessment of the impact is a reduction of its flash availability of at least 6.5 exabytes. The company is working closely with its joint venture partner, Kioxia, to implement necessary measures that will restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible.

Western Digital creates environments for data to thrive. As a leader in data infrastructure, the company is driving the innovation needed to help customers capture, preserve, access and transform an ever-increasing diversity of data. Everywhere data lives, from advanced data centers to mobile sensors to personal devices, our industry-leading solutions deliver the possibilities of data. Our data-centric solutions are comprised of the Western Digital, G-Technology, SanDisk, and WD brands.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

So we have this problem, but hey look at us and our infrastructure!

Seems like a long term (months?) fix and isnt even started.

 

[Valantar]

"Oh, flash prices have been dropping continuously due to market saturation you say? Well that's unfortu*whoops* Oh, how on earth did I manage to spill that into this container of this vital chemical? How clumsy of me."

 

[MachineLearning]

Classic

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

"Oh, flash prices have been dropping continuously due to market saturation you say? Well that's unfortu*whoops* Oh, how on earth did I manage to spill that into this container of this vital chemical? How clumsy of me."

HAHAHAHA, I was literally going to come and make the same type of comment, but mine was going to be the board members of WD complaining about GPU prices going through the roof and how they could tap into that market

 

[Readlight]

Soon everyone will get products with manufacturing defects. I can see WD hard drive CNC milling mistakes.

 

[Vya Domus]

Not that I actually believe this was done on purpose but this shows how absurd these situations have gotten. You just can't have a handful of players account for the vast majority of the volume manufactured in critical industries, the world literally runs on computers. Accidents do happen and what do you then ? Just casually accept that a significant chunk of the supply of critical components will be gone for X amount of weeks/months/years ?

 

[Valantar]

Not that I actually believe this was done on purpose but this shows how absurd these situations have gotten. You just can't have a handful of players account for the vast majority of the volume manufactured in critical industries, the world literally runs on computers. Accidents do happen and what do you then ? Just casually accept that a significant chunk of the supply of critical components will be gone for X amount of weeks/months/years ?

Just another demonstration of the indisputable fact that markets do not self-regulate in any meaningful way that is beneficial to society, but instead tend towards monopolization and increased profits at the cost of massive precarity and borderline abandonment of any thought of the societal functions the companies actually fulfill. As long as failures are sufficiently rare or bring with them price hikes to compensate, there is no incentive against hyper-concentration. In purely profit-oriented economic terms, it's "more efficient".

 

[bug]

It's like storage makers have no respect for people's pr0n collections anymore

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Yikes that's a lot

 

[goodeedidid]

That's like all the flash memory in the world right? lol

 

[TheUn4seen]

Whoopsiedoodles. It's funny how those accidents always tend to happen when prices drop too much and the companies don't really try to make it sound plausible. Memory has gotten too cheap? Say you had an accident and pump those prices, no one can question it because your process is a trade secret. But here, the inrernally verified documents say that's what happened, and a corporation would never lie for profit.

 

[mechtech]

Write it off WD and carry on. If they Jack prices don’t buy WD.

how much chips is 6.3 exabytes actually
Isn’t there 1 TB single nand chip now?

so 1PT would be a 1000 chips and an EB 1,000,000 chips??

how many on a wafer? 750? So 8700 ish wafers worth of chips?? How much production worth of chips is that? 1 month??

 

[bug]

Whoopsiedoodles. It's funny how those accidents always tend to happen when prices drop too much and the companies don't really try to make it sound plausible. Memory has gotten too cheap? Say you had an accident and pump those prices, no one can question it because your process is a trade secret. But here, the inrernally verified documents say that's what happened, and a corporation would never lie for profit.

It's also funny how these comments always pop up every time a fab has a mishap like this. Despite the fact that 1TB SSD have stagnated at 10-12c/GB for years.

 

[Wirko]

6.5 exabytes ... divide that by the number of people on Earth. You need to work for an advertiser spy agency or a government spy agency to have some understanding of what this amount of data even means.

 

[medi01]

Flash mem industry looks around at everything mysteriously being "in shortage".
"Oh, contamination hits us!"

Right.

How big will be the flash mem price spike?

 

[tomo82]

That's probably 10% of the cat videos on Youtube

 

[bug]

6.5 exabytes ... divide that by the number of people on Earth. You need to work for an advertiser spy agency or a government spy agency to have some understanding of what this amount of data even means.

15 min of UHD kittens apiece?

 

[Deleted member 24505]

That's like all the flash memory in the world right? lol

6,500,000,000 GB

 

[Chomiq]

More details on the incident:

Chemical contamination at Kioxia/WD 3D NAND fabs

Operations at Yokkaichi and Kitakami affected

www.theregister.com

A Kioxia statement says that, in late January, a chemical used in 3D NAND production was found to be contaminated and production was affected. Measures are being taken to restore normal production. Manufacture of 2D NAND is not affected.

The consequences of this latest incident may push the price of NAND Flash in Q2 to spike 5~10 per cent.

If the affected chemical was a gas or liquid then tanks used to store it, and pipes used to deliver it around the plant and into machines, will have to be emptied and cleaned, and then tanks restocked. The machines themselves will have to be cleaned. This will take time.

It is unclear to what extent the chemical impacts could have affected the fab manufacturing equipment.

 

[Testsubject01]

It's also funny how these comments always pop up every time a fab has a mishap like this. Despite the fact that 1TB SSD have stagnated at 10-12c/GB for years.

Some people might argue, that it is due to those oddly coincidently timed accidents over and over. We will never know.

 

[bug]

Some people might argue, that it is due to those oddly coincidently timed accidents over and over. We will never know.

Coincidental with what? I have just told you retail prices have been steady for years.
And if you're going to tell me this was done on purpose to push the prices up, I will tell you you're just confusing cause and effect. Plus, literally one post above yours, you have the estimation that this will only move prices 5-10%.

 

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

Why do we hear about flash memory factories accidents like 4 times a year, but HDDs have only had one major accident during the 2011 thailand flood... its so suspicious is all

Well, hard drives aint going away anytime soon

 

[Vayra86]

It's like storage makers have no respect for people's pr0n collections anymore

Collections? You have pr0nhub now.

 

[sparkyar]

Power outages, Floods, Fires, Contamination... They are getting "very creative", I expect ninjas or an alien invasion at some point, we´ll only have to wait for the next drop of nand prices in 2 or 3 years...