Discussion

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

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

sosborn: Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.

smallerize: A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.

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

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

FpUser: 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).

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

tombert: 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.

downrightmike: Free markets, yes

red_admiral: 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: Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards

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

tombert: 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.

whatever1: 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: 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?

Imustaskforhelp: 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: USA tried this with the CHIPS act

pjc50: > just a few million dollarsTSMC 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.

xbmcuser: 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.

hirako2000: 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: [delayed]