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

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35 points

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_tk_

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2 hours ago

24 comments

profsummergig ・ 12 minutes ago

Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first fab to begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? To me that seemed like almost an easy cop-out. To me, microprocessors seemed like the real game.

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

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

whatever1 ・ 13 minutes ago

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.

  • hall0ween ・ 9 minutes ago

    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?

tombert ・ an hour ago

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.

  • hirako2000 ・ 12 minutes ago

    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 ?

    • tombert ・ 4 minutes ago

      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 ・ 35 minutes ago

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

    • tombert ・ 31 minutes ago

      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.

il ・ 2 hours ago

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

  • miki123211 ・ an hour ago

    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 ・ an hour ago

    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 ・ an hour ago

    Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.

  • pfortuny ・ an hour ago

    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 ・ an hour ago

    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 ・ an hour ago

    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 ・ an hour ago

    A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.

    • analognoise ・ an hour ago

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

      • Imustaskforhelp ・ an hour ago
        ・ 2 more

        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?

        • spencerflem ・ 11 minutes ago

          USA tried this with the CHIPS act

  • cyanydeez ・ an hour ago

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

    • FpUser ・ an hour ago

      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 ・ an hour ago

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 ・ 29 minutes ago

    Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards