ASUS Running Out of Hard Disks 207
The hard drive crunch continues; reader Thorfinn.au writes "ASUS has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November. 'Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation persists, not only notebook production will be affected but also desktops, and other component shipments will also drop,' Asustek CFO David Chang told Reuters."
Supply for Q4 to be down 28% (Score:3)
Re:Supply for Q4 to be down 28% (Score:5, Interesting)
i found a few pictures of the flooded WD factory here:
(flip forward in the photo album)
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150371103772908 [facebook.com]
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Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Toshiba, and Samsung, they have all had good batches and bad batches. Over the past 15 years, I'd say they all even out. The true measure of a hard drive manufacturer isn't really in the product itself, but in their warranty service. In that sense, I have to give WD the crown, followed very closely by Seagate. The key thing to remember is that all drives will eventually fail.
WD: zero hassle RMA. Plug in up to 5 serial numbers, and optionally order a cross-shipped replacement. 30
that's 28% of the 25% = 7% of global production (Score:2)
That's for Thailand alone, they do make 25% of the world's disks. So that 7% drop is significant, but not dire. Other factories can and will kick up production temporarily because of the rising prices.
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The article doesn't make that clear, although 7% is consistent with the size of the HDD market. But the impact on the market is more severe than that. Anybody using WD as a primary drive brand (for uniformity in enterprise applications) is going to get stuck with massive price increases: The cost of WD drives has more than doubled over the past few weeks, with a 3TB drive going from ~$130 to ~$280. Companies that aren't forced to stick with WD (computer vendors perhaps) will still face the task of validatin
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the worst flooding in the country for more than half a century
Well there you go. They built a fab on a known flood plain. I wonder what the actuarial table for that looks like. That is assuming, of course, that WD even bothered with flood insurance [google.com]...
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The paranoid would say that this is a plan by the HDD manufacturers to get people to switch over to SSD's instead.
No. It's clear that that kind of flooding will have real impact on manufacturing and prices.
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"Bizarro CEO run spinny plate company good! Next year we move to square spinny plates."
The return of Linux on Eee? (Score:2)
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Frankly, on a netbook, how would Win7 be less comfortable on those 32 Gigs? Depending on what use you see for a netbook, of course. For me, it's not a mediaplayer and not a gaming rig. So what would I need more than 32 gigs for, even with Win7? Office does not produce files THAT bloated and my email account isn't that overfilled either.
Re:The return of Linux on Eee? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a media center at home. I installed Vista about 4 years ago. I let it run and update itself automatically. All data was on other drives (music, pics, recorded TV, etc...). C: was a 30GB partition. I was under the assumption that this was more than enough.
One day, toughly 3 years after install, the thing displayed a whole lot of error messages and whatnot. I decided to reboot it. The same error messages were displayed, do I dived in.
C: had filled up entirely. 0 bytes available. So I looked up on the internet and cleaned up what was not necessary - namely all packages and updates ever received through the net were still there and everything that was patched was also backed up. I freed about 18GB in 5 minutes of worthless files.
As a matter of fact, I just checked my HDD while writing this post. To make sure the size was correct. I only have about 400MB of free space on C:. Time to garbage collect, but this time, I think Vista will be part of the garbage and will be collected as well.
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You get rid of the backed up system updates via CCleaner (Advanced > Hotfix Uninstallers). But it won't remove the downloaded files so manual remove from %WINDIR%\softwaredistribution\download. I do this after every Patch Tuesday.
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i hope you only do this for your self and not anyone else - god for bid you need to roll one back or use a hotfix that requires a previous update be reapplied.
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Proof by anecdote, I know, but I've never had any issues cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download. Now, C:\Windows\Installer on the other hand... Just leave that one alone. Compress it if you want, but don't delete that stuff, or you will majorly screw up subsequent installations/uninstallations.
Funny enough, this is based on my experiences cramming Windows XP onto a 4 GB Eee PC.
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Yes, cleaning out C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download is perfectly safe but usually unnecessary.
Updates are downloaded into that folder and then installed. If the installation of an update i
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I think you can turn that backup off, or limit the space it uses. It's been a while since I've looked, and since when I got mine the 500GB HD cost about the same as a 30GB drive, I didn't have to worry about having "too many backups."
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So you didn't bother to understand how your system works, or do any active maintenance of it, and it stopped working?
What a shock!
It doesn't appear in Disk Cleanup (Score:2)
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After a couple months of active use, the PC should assume that the hotfix is a keeper and recommend its uninstall files for removal in Disk Cleanup.
Is Disk Cleanup actually usable in modern versions of Windows? In XP it would sit there forever scanning to tell me how much space I could save by compressing my multiple terabytes of files even though I had no intention of compressing anything -- most of it was DV and HDV video I was editing -- and just wanted it to delete the crap that accumulates in Windows over time.
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It's not that simple. There are multiple code branches of Windows (LDR vs GDR) and the old files can be needed for future servicing. Assuming the OP is talking about the WinSxS folder, the OP basically just irreparably broke servicing (adding/removing features and hotfixes/service packs) on this Windows install.
DO NOT DO THIS.
LDR vs. GDR (Score:2)
There are multiple code branches of Windows (LDR vs GDR)
I had never heard of LDR vs. GDR until now, apart from GDR being the former East Germany, so I went to Google and typed in windows ldr gdr. It gave me this post [marc.info]:
So in laptop and home situations, where nobody uses anything but Windows Update, what's needed for servicing other than GDR?
and the old files can be needed for future servicing
If the method of servicing used by Windows requires keeping 18 GB of unused files around, then
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Hmmm. Thanks for your invaluable insight.
To put that in context, I was answering someone that claimed that 32GB would be enough for an install of Windows 7. I was merely pointing out that this was most likely not true, while at the same time sharing an anecdote that happened at home.
But rest assured that your most insightful wisdom will be remembered.
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This isn't rocket science. Some things the machine should be able to handle on it's own. It's there to enable automation. So automate already. If "professionally developed commercial software" can't do better than a few ill conceived hastily constructed shell scripts, then no one should be making excuses for it.
Cruft simply should not accumulate until the machine stops.
Yeah. The machine should be smart enough to remove stuff it put there itself and hasn't touched in 2 years.
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Because the standard Win7install requires "16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)"
Which is the absolute minimum requirements. You'll soon fill the remaining 16Gb up with software updates, applications and data.
I try to install programs and user data on my D drive, but Win7 still has taken up 30.4 Gb. My untouched-by-me Windows subdirectory takes up 20.8 Gb! (10.9 Gb of which is in that crappy WinSxS directory)
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(10.9 Gb of which is in that crappy WinSxS directory)
I think Windows actually over reports the size of that due to all the linking in there. About WinSxS. [technet.com]
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I think Windows actually over reports the size of that due to all the linking in there.
According to your link, it's the other way around, in that every bit of the OS is in the WinSxS directory, and the versions in other directories are links.
But, the real point is that it grows large because Microsoft has determined two things:
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their patches aren't very good quality, and might need to be uninstalled regularly enough that 4-5 old versions of the same file are required to be kept around
You forgot to add that they think it's better to fill up your disk with this crap than to just download it from the internet again if it's needed.
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even better - delete System32, free up 32 GB! (Score:2, Funny)
When Microsoft was first getting started, they knew they wouldn't make enough money just from the profits of their operating system. Everybody knows people pirate Windows. So they had to get creative. A guy named Chris Liddel came up with the idea to put a folder called "system32" in the Windows folder that literally slows down your machine--on purpose. "System32" holds 32 GIGABYTES of deleted files, internet history, uninstalled programs, and other worthless crap that intentionally clogs u
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Whoosh...
It should go without saying, but as a public service for anyone who might NOT know what the system32 folder is for who might be tempted to try it:
Don't. It's where configuration, libraries, and drivers (among other things) are stored.
Pretty much the Windows analog to 'sudo rm -rf /var /lib /etc' on linux. (Protip: Don't try THAT either)
The more you know.
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I normally would have assumed it would have been laughed off and no explanation was needed, but the first reply called him out on the faulty spin-logic without mention of it.
You're right, though. It was quite depressing.
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Bullshit. My wive's PC runs on a 32 gig SSD (although userfiles are linked onto a magnetic disk).
You're clearly doing something wrong.
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First: Wife's.
Second: Well, I stand corrected... it might not be bullshit that Win7 takes 20 gigs... but how is that relevant to my question? My wife does have windows running on such a disk with Office installed and mostly games diverted to a magnetic drive.
A freaking PC. Not a netbook. So why aren't 32 gigs not enough for a netbook?
Also, why are we talking about 32 gigs anyway? There are enough larger SSDs available that are quite affordable, aren't there?
Comparable price range (Score:2)
There are enough larger SSDs available that are quite affordable, aren't there?
Any in the same price range as the hard drives that were available just before disaster hit?
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Perhaps she just uses it as a Farmville terminal.
That takes a load off the whole "storage problem" right there.
It''s a lot easier to "get by" with a resource that you aren't really using to begin with. It's like one of my HTPCs that don't even store their apps locally.
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My Windows directory on my work machine is 24GB, and my home machine, which has been around a bit longer, is up over 30GB at this point.
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Nobody told my supermarket about the disk shortage (Score:2)
I picked up a cheap external 2T Seagate drive yesterday at my local discount supermarket, in their specials sections. I guess that they are not aware of the disk shortage, and thus didn't raise the price on it. Now in a computer or electronics store, it is probably a different story. They have "heard" about the shortage, and thus have raised the prices. If everyone keeps talking about the shortage, the prices will continue to rise, despite the supply. For a while, at least.
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Putting crap in would be an improvement over Seagate.
I buy HDDs around this time of year... (Score:3)
Because of Black Friday around the corner and other holidays coming up. I tend to buy my large capacity HDDs online due to insanely low prices.
But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Believe it or not, 1/4 of my drives I bought as refurbed and have yet to crap out *knock on wood*, so if you want a cheap large capacity HDD, then a refurb drive might be your only option if their prices do not shoot sky high as the brand new ones...
I might also have better luck scoring a cheap drive locally...
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But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Why ever not. Unless your income has dropped dramatically a 1TB or 2TB disk is no less affordable today than it was a year or two ago. All that's happened is that prices have gone BACK to the levels they were at some point in the past. If they were affordable then, they still are today.
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But now it looks like I cannot afford them and will have to look into buying refurbished hdds.
Why ever not. Unless your income has dropped dramatically a 1TB or 2TB disk is no less affordable today than it was a year or two ago.
Unless your storage demands have grown apace of the normal increase in available capacities.
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Unless your storage demands have grown apace of the normal increase in available capacities.
My media collection still requires the same storage space. It's not like the 80's are coming back any time soon.
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Best Buy has 2TB Seagates for $75, 5900 RPM and five year warranties. Excellent deal right now.
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I have two old, used PATA/IDE desktop HDDs that still work iin storage. I wonder if they will be worth a lot now/soon?
Single point of failure (Score:3)
I like how one little country that normally doesn't play a big role in the world, is flooded and suddenly its a big deal. How many of the disk makers have factories located there?
And here I was all set to buy two 2 TB disks.
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My money is based on how gas prices skyrocketed when hurricanes pounded the gulf - despite a large portion of our fuel coming via other routes/means. Just a handy excuse to create a virtual scarcity and thus temporary increase in profit.
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Consider the notion of going to a college where there are 11 guys per 10 girls.
No further consider the idea that 9 out of 10 of the girls may already be dating.
What is the competition for the remaining girl?
2:1.
Now you understand why small deltas in availability of a product (apologies to the ladies) may create disproportionate competitive effects.
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Great explanation.
The reason is simple : most of the large PC manufacturers write contracts with the parts manufacturers so that they can buy up to a given number of stuff at a predetermined price. Not only disks, but also DRAM (price known to fluctuate wildly), flash memory, capacitors, etc etc etc. These are the guys who are dating those 9 out of the 10 girls.
I'm actually quite surprised that ASUS didn't secure a stable supply chain - now they have to shut their business down simply because they can't g
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Agreed. Well put.
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When "THE" gas pipeline supplying Phoenix AZ(from Texas via Tucson) broke in '03 gas prices spiked from ~$1.25/g to over $3/g over-night. Nary a word was mentioned in the news/market reports/price volatility about that 'other' supply line from Cali. No mention was made of the fact that we could drive 15 miles North of town and buy gas in Black Canyon City(town) for ~$1.25. I find a lot of the news I hear is tailored to a specific objective that has little to do with the 'news'.
IE: This summer was "one of th
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Well, actually, it *is* kind of a big deal, only because the hard disk makers have undergone a lot of consolidation over the years, and the few that remain all chose to put at least a couple of their major facilities in the same location.
I know Seagate said they're NOT affected directly, as they have no flooded plants - BUT they're having problems sourcing components because one of the largest manufacturers of the spindle motors for drives is located there and was flooded out. I believe the same goes for a
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Why?
Internal VPS (Score:2)
My thought was to get a couple of mongo-huge drives and set up basically an internal Linux VPS-host server to hold us off until things get back on track.
Unfortunately, trying to google what one might do to accomplish that is an exercise in pain (results flooded with VPS hosting companies) and, as much as I love FreeBSD, I'd rather avoid a full architecture shift to use jails.
Dear ASUS (Score:3)
1. Make laptops with 60GB SSDs instead of 250GB HDDs.
2. Offer them without Windows and package an Ubuntu CD instead.
3. Sell them at the same price as before.
4. Profit!
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Funny)
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
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However, keeping excess production capacity around, even if it sits idle, means it can be ramped up quickly to take advantage of situations like this.
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Uhh another MBA?
Because it's cheap to have workforce with special education standing around and waiting, keeping equipment maintained and updating manufacturing processes every once in a while?
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
Keeping idle production capacity around is extremely expensive.
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Not as expensive as getting owned by the Chinese and completely losing our economy, and then exporting the jobs to the lowest bidder every time, causing local disasters in those areas to cause massive problems.
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The hard disk industry is extremely competitive - one hard disk is much like another, and there is little customer loyalty. Paying for idle production capacity is generally wasted money, since you need to pay for wages, factories, tooling for the factories etc. The lifetime of an established production line is, at best, a couple of years. Think of all the industrial robots and other custom hardware that is required to build a modern hard disk, and then consider that this equipment needs updating every 12 mo
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We keep hearing that the U.S. manufacturing sector is horribly depressed due to competition from foreign firms. There is an oversupply of cheap labor overseas and the U.S. simply can't compete.
But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
No, but seeing as how you made half-assed assumptions about what he said, I'm guessing you do.
Ramping up production doesn't necessarily mean building a new factory. It could instead mean increasing the number of workers at existing factories in order to increase output, particularly if they had already scaled back production due to market influences.
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after you have done that, let me know if you were born before or after the supplies expired
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build a hard drive factory in response to a temporary shortage.....
No, just re-open the US HDD factories that got mothballed when production shifted to the far east.
All we need is a supply of PCIe ST-506 controllers.
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Don't worry. With the way the US economy is going Thailand will be outsourcing the jobs back to us. By my grandkids time Brazil and India will outsource to China who will sub-outsources to Thailand who will outsource back to the US where it will be boycotted for not being a US made good, but some foreign Brazilian product.
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:4, Funny)
lemme guess, you hold an MBA?
Lemme guess, you don't?
Nah, but when I was 12 I got kicked in the head by a horse, which I figure is pretty much the same thing.
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
US workers won't work in a HDD manufacturing mill without getting $15+/hr plus benefits...
My god! $30K/year and health insurance? What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
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> What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
It won't affect the top 1% at all. The rest of us, on the other hand, will find hard drives much less affordable.
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
But when labor has more money, they can buy more goods. That makes more jobs, and everyone is better off. A rising tide raises all ships.
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is to prohibit corporations that want to do business in America from sidestepping American laws on environmental regulation and wages. Won't ever happen, but that would solve the problem.
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No, it would just force companies who want to do business in foreign countries to pay minimum wage.
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The best thing that we can do for workers in those countries is to increase the demand for products produced there, leading to a labor shortage that benefits the workers.
Re:Opportunity for U.S. manufacturing to step up? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I guess that's the part that you Occupy guys don't ever quite suss out.
Do you really think that "the 1%" is going to eat the cost of paying someone better wages and benefits, or do you think they are going to roll that into the price that "the 99%" pays for the same goods and services that they already buy?
How do you think "the 1%" became "the 1%" in the first place? How does it serve "the 99%" to pay more for stuff when they are already financially burdened in this current economy?
The solution to the curr
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"My god! $30K/year and health insurance? What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?"
How much MORE are YOU willing to pay to fund those wages as opposed to buying from a cheaper supplier?
The reason Americans can afford personal computers is that we don't MAKE them.
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Restart that old factory (Score:2)
... and start making those 20 MB harddrives again! If they screw up overseas, you might as well do it yourselves.
-- I sell floppy disks on eBay for $ 20 each.
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Mmmm... what we "clearly see here" is not chronic under-supply, but supply disruption by exceptional weather.
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I doubt we currently have the infrastructure to manufacture the drives, or else some manufacturer would be doing just that and hugely advertising "Hey, we've still got drives!" Considering production of hard drives is only supposed to be down for a year or so, by the time the ones here were ready to go, so would the foreign ones. Domestic can't keep up with cost, and were back to where we started.
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But we can clearly see here that there is a high demand for hard drives and not enough supply to go around. I wonder what the prospects might be for domestic manufacturing to start ramping up to meet the demand?
Slim and none. You don't just grab people off the dole line, put them in an abandoned warehouse and make HDDs. It takes a high tech factory with clean rooms and robotics that will take at least a couple years to build. By the time you got the first HDD rolling off the factory floor, the crisis would long since be over.
P.S. For the person taking a jab at the MBAs, in this I think they would fully in agreement with the engineers.
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No, existing factories elsewhere will merely kick production up a bit because of the rising prices. We're talking about 28% of the 25% of disks worldwide that are made in Thailand. This 7% loss isn't the end of the world.
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SSDs are dirt cheap to make, I sell plans for $20 where you can make your own out of parts you can get a radioshack for under $30.
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Some of my suppliers have more than doubled their prices -- in some cases quadrupled them.
£200 for a 1.5TB drive, anyone?
One of the parts scalpers emailed me with a "limited time offer" too -- £895 for a 1TB... they can keep it.
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Is that site smart enough to only list prices from vendors that actually have the things in stock? If not then with many vendors selling out of many drive models it may be considerablly underestimating how much prices have risen.
When I look at my local parts vendor I see prices of arround £100 for a 1TB drive that is in stock but 1TB drives that are out of stock are still listed starting at arround £50. Similarlly 2TB drives that are in stock are listed at about £120 while ones that are ou
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Just put some stickers over the holes that say "warranty void if removed. " Done.
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Nobody has ever demonstrated recovery of data from a drive that had been written across with all zeros.
Maybe the NSA can do it, but they're just as likely to also have backdoors in the NIC firmware and router IOS, so what's the point of hiding from them.
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But, with each bit you have only a 50% possibility of recovering the data from that bit. Figure in the probability of determining 100% detection of several billion bits, and you will come to the realization that the only way to recover any data off the drive is by building an improbability engine (but of course he principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability is by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian