WD expects to produce six exabytes less flash NAND due to power outage

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 06/29/2019 08:12 AM | source: westerndigital | 29 comment(s)

Western Digital will produce six exabytes less flash NAND memory than planned due to a power outage at its Toshiba Memory Corporation joint venture on June 15, the company reports. An exabyte is 1000 petabytes = 1million terabytes = 1billion gigabytes.

The power failure occurred on Saturday, June 15 in the Yokkaichi region in Japan. The incident affected the facilities of the joint venture between Toshiba and Western Digital, which meant that, among other things, the process tools for processing wafers for the production of nand memory did not function for a short time. TrendForce reports that the power outage lasted only thirteen minutes. Daughter division of TrendForce DRAMeXchange, which analyzes memory prices, expects the prices for 2d-nand to rise as a result of the incident, while the price reductions for stacked 3d-nand may flatten out.

- WD - SAN JOSE, CA - Jun 27, 2019

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) announced that on Saturday, June 15, an unexpected power outage occurred in the Yokkaichi region in Japan, affecting production operations at the flash fabrication facilities operated by the company's joint venture partner, Toshiba Memory Corporation. The power outage impacted both the facilities and process tools and Western Digital is working closely with its joint venture partner to bring the facilities back to normal operational status as quickly as possible.

Western Digital continues to assess the impact of this event. The company currently expects the incident will result in a reduction of Western Digital's flash wafer availability of approximately 6 exabytes, the majority of which is expected to be contained in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020.

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TheDeeGee
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#5685462 Posted on: 06/29/2019 10:46 AM

We all know what's the cause of the outage.

The low prices...

sverek
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#5685471 Posted on: 06/29/2019 11:48 AM

Silva
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#5685474 Posted on: 06/29/2019 12:04 PM

We all know what's the cause of the outage.

The low prices...
Probably failed to pay for the power bill...

DmitryKo
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#5685500 Posted on: 06/29/2019 02:38 PM

6 exabytes equal 6 million terabytes - which would be ~15-20 million SSD drives, given the popularity of 256GB and 512GB disks.
This year SSD shipments are projected to be ~280 million SSD drives , ~70 million per quarter.

So that's about 20-30 percent of the world's total manufacturing capacity in Q1 2019.

alanm
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#5685517 Posted on: 06/29/2019 04:44 PM

No backup generators?

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