>Two factories used by Western Digital and Kioxia have been affected.
>Solid-state storage devices have so far been spared from the scarcity and high prices that the chip shortage has wrought upon graphics cards, cars, Raspberry Pi boards, and innumerable other products. But that may change soon, due in part to a "contamination" at two Japanese factories used by Western Digital and Kioxia to make flash memory.
>According to a short Western Digital press release, the contamination issue has affected "at least" 6.5 exabytes of flash memory, which works out to just under 7 million terabytes or 7 billion gigabytes—that's a lot of NAND that will suddenly be unavailable for SSDs, phones, memory cards, and USB drives. An analyst speaking to Bloomberg suggested that the final total of affected memory could be as much as 16 exabytes.
>The contamination issue could be compounded by other factors, like a recent COVID-19-related shutdown at one of Samsung's Chinese NAND factories. Real or perceived scarcity of SSDs or other components could also lure in scalpers seeking to make a quick buck by snapping up available stock and selling it on eBay or elsewhere at inflated prices.
>Countries and businesses are investing billions of dollars in additional chipmaking capacity right now, but the long lead time on these factories means that most companies and analysts expect chip shortages to last throughout 2022 and beyond. Shortages of everything from wafers and packaging materials to labor aren't helping. And with inventories low and supply chains stretched thin, normal, run-of-the-mill manufacturing errors and factory shutdowns can have an outsize impact on pricing and availability.
I wish an asian girl would contaminate my 7 billion alveoli if you catch my drift
Cameron Cruz
everyone told me before that chia was going to kill the SSD market but it never did
Isaiah Johnson
lol everybody wants to get in on that "use the pandemic to milk people dry" business
Andrew Taylor
WOOOOOOWWWWW what a coinky-dinky, there's an oversupply of memory that's been causing SSD prices to finally fucking fall and then this happens. What are the odds right. Reminds me of a year or two ago when there was another oversupply that was projected to cause a big dip in SSD prices, and somehow that never materialized either. It's almost like these companies keep pulling tricks to keep their prices inflated to hell.
someone took a shit where they weren't supposed to
Kevin Collins
they mixed up silicon with silicone
Evan Moore
They got preloaded with the wrong CIA firmware and thus are full of poorly encrypted CP
Daniel Carter
right? I was thinking maybe there was a loose voltage that fried sh it or maybe a heap of chips defective but i believe it's covid related, as in, someone on the assembly was hacking/sneezing on shit while doing qa.
Julian Butler
They found dead rats inside the huge chemical vats bought from China
Austin Rivera
I'm guessing that they had a large batch of wafers and they got contaminated? microscopic flaws can seriously affect the quality of chips. that's why binned cpus exist, microscopic flaws turn what could have been a 3090 into a 3050.
Jayden Watson
Contaminated with what?
Matthew Scott
all a conspiracy to get more and more people into (((cloud computing)))
Ayden Nguyen
This is way more likely to fuck shit up than Chia. Several years ago a tsunami (?) hit a bunch of HDD factories and the prices soared for a while.
Logan Kelly
Oh no, it's time for biyearly memory/hdd/flash producer fake shortage to hike prices again.
They are just creating artificial scarcity at this point, don't they?
Tyler Jones
from diamonds to ssds, that shit just works
Ryder Kelly
yep. prices for hdds were up for months (years?) after the flood referenced here . we've been stuck at $100/tb for too long.
Daniel Brown
Scalpers would need to make a coordinated effort because there's a fuckton of existing stock from many different manufacturers on the shelves/warehouses of many retailers. There's also a ton of companies not affected, if it's WD and Kioxia that's what, less than 10% of the market? If price hikes do happen it would be the result of mass panic, like when toilet paper runs out.
Jack Kelly
Apparently scalpers are the last remaining group capable of coordinated efforts on this planet
Christopher Scott
It was years and I think HDD prices only started going down when SSDs came in.
