Oh come on now your trying to tell us that a multi billion dollar fab doesn't have a continuous power supply good for a few days at least without the national grid :P I just don't believe that to be true

Sure, why not install a 100 MW backup power plant in the basement, just in case of an event that lasts a few minutes once in a lifetime? 🙂 A complete power outage on a production facility which uses industrial-grade voltage could only be alleviated with a multi megawatt-hour class battery backup station - these are still a rarity in Japan, and overall they are ordered and maintained by local power grid companies, not by individual industries.

I hope it doesnt turn out like DDR4 price fixing fiasco or the HDD shortage due to the flooding..... but WD + Toshiba produce around 35% of the NAD, only Samsung is bigger, lets hope SK Hynex and Micron see this as an opportunity to grab some market share instead of join the price gauging that kinda looks is going to happen.

Well for sure I will be buying a new drive ASAP.

DmitryKo:

Sure, why not install a 100 MW backup power plant in the basement, just in case of an event that lasts a few minutes once in a lifetime? 🙂 A complete power outage on a production facility which uses industrial-grade voltage could only be alleviated with a multi megawatt-hour class battery backup station - these are still a rarity in Japan, and overall they are ordered and maintained by local power grid companies, not by individual industries.

so What do you think this is for, running the coffee machines or something as equally inane as thathttps://www.techpowerup.com/forums/attachments/125982/

I hate to say it, but I already was doubtful of SSD prices in full drop. Just like I didn't believe in RAM dropping (they're still not below 2016 prices for low spec DDR4!). Seems I wasn't too far off. Funny how these "accidents" always happen when components / hardware seems to get a big price drop.

Athlonite:

so What do you think this is for, running the coffee machines

These are prefabricated portable buildings, most likely temporary living quarters for construction workers (a different angle; current state with a parking lot). Diesel backup generator station of that scale would be very expensive to install and maintain. More than that, it's not really uninterruptable unless it runs full time on - and even a <1 second outage or grid irregularity can ruin the entire batch of wafers in production, which will idle the plant for several months while the full production cycle is restarted. http://energyskeptic.com/2014/interdependent-chip-fab-electricgrid-financial-sys/ Only megawatt-class uninterruptable battery power would help alleviate these issues, but as I said above these are still very rare.

Ram prices are dropping a lot as well, so we gotta do something! >_> https://www.techpowerup.com/257092/japan-and-south-korea-disagreements-could-compromise-global-memory-supply

DmitryKo:

These are prefabricated portable buildings, most likely temporary living quarters for construction workers (a different angle; current state with a parking lot). Diesel backup generator station of that scale would be very expensive to install and maintain. More than that, it's not really uninterruptable unless it runs full time on - and even a <1 second outage or grid irregularity can ruin the entire batch of wafers in production, which will idle the plant for several months while the full production cycle is restarted. http://energyskeptic.com/2014/interdependent-chip-fab-electricgrid-financial-sys/ Only megawatt-class uninterruptable battery power would help alleviate these issues, but as I said above these are still very rare.

I don't think he's going to fess up to being clueless. I did this professionally. In the US, a complete power loss for the top 5 semi corp I worked for would have shut down every process and destroyed whatever was in process. The few exceptions might be some inkers or a few other systems with their own portable UPS.