[HN Gopher] Western Digital says contamination impacting product...
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Western Digital says contamination impacting production at Japanese
facilities
Author : elorant
Score : 134 points
Date : 2022-02-10 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Was it a fly[0], by any chance?
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rUEJwsXbnk
| taneq wrote:
| You wouldn't think they'd ship buggy hard drives, would you?
| tentacleuno wrote:
| I never really think about it, although I imagine the chip
| shortage is putting a big dent in the production of HDD's /
| SSD's.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| is this done on purpose?
| oivey wrote:
| Why would it be? If it drives up prices, WD is less able to
| capture that price increase due to production losses than its
| competitors.
| nitred wrote:
| Does anyone know what kind of products this kind of flash storage
| is used in? SSDs or NVMe SSD or something else?
| numpad0 wrote:
| > said they're working to get the plants in Yokkaichi and
| Kitakami back to normal operations as quickly as possible. >
| Kioxia said its newer and more lucrative type of 3D flash was
| the product line impacted, and "the company does not anticipate
| that shipment of its conventional 2D NAND flash memory will be
| affected."
|
| Reads like NAND chips marketed as Kioxia BiCS4.
|
| 1:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/western-d...
| 3np wrote:
| In general Kioxia are making SSDs (NVME and otherwise) as well
| as USB drives and SD cards. I'm guessing this affects the whole
| range.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Everything that uses NAND flash, which ranges from computers to
| phones to TVs. WD and Kioxia supply chips to the commodity
| market, not just for their own branded products.
|
| For example 40% of "Brand X" SSD drives might have WD chips,
| 40% Toshiba chips, and 20% Samsung chips so the manufacturer
| can get a better price and/or diversify supply. If WD can only
| supply 25% next quarter orders to Toshiba and Samsung will
| increase. That will naturally push prices up to some degree.
| [deleted]
| wronglebowski wrote:
| What does contamination even mean in this context?
| usr1106 wrote:
| Exactly. Pretty poor news article not addressing this. At least
| they could have added "The manufacturer declined to comment on
| how the contamination occured" if that's the case.
|
| Poor manufacturing process? (Of course poor is relative in
| today's silicon) Sabotage? Earthquake? (They have them all the
| time) Radiation from Fukushima? (Maybe a bit late 10 years
| after)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Impurities in raw materials?
| bell-cot wrote:
| In scientific terms - some chemical (used in the production)
| was _supposed_ to be 99.999999% pure...but was _not_ , and the
| offending impurity(ies) was (in terms of consequences for the
| uber-delicate production processes) Profoundly Unhelpful.
|
| In poetic terms - a hundred thousand tiny demons got loose in
| the plant, and each and every one of them will need to be
| laboriously exorcised, before production can resume.
| MisterTea wrote:
| FOD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage
|
| Working in Communications/Medical/Aerospace manufacturing, this
| is a MASSIVE concern.
| bredren wrote:
| This is worth a click just to see the "Potential foreign
| object debris" found in the wheel well of an F/A-18 Hornet on
| a US aircraft carrier.
| gpvos wrote:
| I have now removed that unrelated image.
| [deleted]
| andi999 wrote:
| maybe dust?
| gene-h wrote:
| High tech electronics can be quite sensitive to small
| contaminants in manufacturing equipment. A plant making HDDs
| accidentally lubricated some of the machinery with silicone which
| turned out to be very bad. This silicone got into the disks and
| as the head passed over the disk it got hot enough to decompose
| the silicone oil into silica. So effectively, the hard drive disk
| got covered in sand and caused the hard drives to fail much
| faster.
|
| The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so
| the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.
|
| I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where
| some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny
| whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started
| shorting out the electronics.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I was watching a video about the gold coating on the JWST
| primary mirror segments and noticed a conspicuously placed sign
| warning employees not to bring anything containing silicone
| into the facility.[1] I had no idea it was such a problem
| contaminant! I wonder if they have issues with personnel using
| silicone based personal products at home.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgn7bKs042Q&t=211s
| emsy wrote:
| What, you mean it's not spelled "silicone valley"?
| blockwriter wrote:
| Scrapped or scraped? Did they really need to abandon the plant
| or the equipment, or just clean it?
| totalZero wrote:
| Silicone oil is one of the most stubborn contaminants I have
| ever encountered. I use trisodium phosphate to clean it up,
| and even then it sometimes persists. Try pouring epoxy over
| wood that has been polished with Pledge, and you'll see what
| I mean.
|
| I can believe "scrapped."
| sitkack wrote:
| Isn't a silicone based oil used in oil diffusion vacuum
| pumps?
|
| Seems like one should look for a different solution
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were
| taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to
| (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate _EVERYTHING_
| from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line /
| formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the
| type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.
| khuey wrote:
| Docker for factories.
| Jabbles wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!
| capableweb wrote:
| That process even has a name: "Copy Exactly!"
|
| > The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the
| manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs
| at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched
| responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching
| over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process
| control systems, and joint Fab management structures
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!
| avs733 wrote:
| sometimes called copy stupid in extreme circumstances
| Kye wrote:
| See: Target's botched move into Canada. They basically
| copied everything they did in the US. This was compounded
| by an optimistic purchase of another company's locations
| to expand into. They bombed the project's runway on that
| and couldn't afford to keep it going while they sorted
| out all the problems resulting from Canada revealing all
| the flaws in their US systems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Canada
| mikepurvis wrote:
| As a Canadian whose partner was initially very excited
| about the Target launch, what killed it for her/us was
| primarily the logistics issues-- you'd go into the store
| and like 20% of the shelves would be empty including
| everything that was supposed to be on markdown, and even
| some of the stuff that was there wouldn't scan properly
| at the till.
|
| But apart from that, I think we got the impression that
| there were some market positioning issues too. Like, in
| the US, Wal-Mart has a reputation for being the absolute
| cheapest, so Target being the "step up" option is a
| pretty reasonable place to be. Whereas in Canada, Wal-
| Mart was _already_ occupying that step-up space (relative
| to discount department stores like Giant Tiger and the
| old Zellers locations that Target Canada bought up), and
| those overseeing the Target push hadn 't really committed
| on whether they wanted to fight Wal-Mart directly for
| that space, or try to go a level further up and take on
| the "nice" department stores like the Bay and Sears.
|
| Neither option was great, given that Wal-Mart was well-
| entrenched and the nice department stores having been
| dying for decades anyway. But not choosing a path at all
| is often worse than either of two bad options might have
| been if they'd at least been fully committed-to.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I believe part of the reason is they completely changed
| their enterprise resource planning & supply chain
| software. There were a LOT of changes, and yet not enough
| - not accounting for Canadian price sensitivity and the
| distances/warehousing difference.
|
| This is a fascinating read I bookmarked at the time :)
|
| http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-
| cana...
|
| I believe (but could be wrong) Home Depot did essentially
| the same thing - used Canadian market as test bed for
| SAP, except they already had an established stable
| presence here.
| monocasa wrote:
| That wiki article makes it sound like they did change
| something compared to the US stores; prices went up.
| Canadian customers knew that from previously crossing the
| border to US Target stores and subsequently stopped going
| pretty much immediately after launch.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| And here us software developers are still trying to do this
| and think we're the smartest people in the room for
| inventing it!
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Back in the days of "classic" ASP pages, the usual model
| at the shop I worked in was that whenever we needed to
| add a page to the site we would copy a working page and
| then modify it. Sure it duplicated a lot of common code,
| but it wasn't without its advantages. You could be pretty
| certain that your page would not break anything else, and
| that later changes to a page would also be self-
| contained. It did suck when a change needed to be made to
| many pages, but if you knew about cygwin and grep, sed,
| and awk, those could often be automated.
| tyrfing wrote:
| That general philosophy seems to be intact. A very recent
| example: a large machine at their Hillsboro research facility
| was dismantled and sent to production in Ireland, with the
| same model with a very slight upgrade shipped in to replace
| it at the R&D location.
|
| Ignore the red herring title: https://semianalysis.com/is-
| intel-shipping-tools-out-of-us-f...
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Siloxanes are serious contaminates in several industrial
| processes. Another big one is powder coating "paint". It can be
| bad even if only comes from a personal care product used by an
| employee at home.
|
| And you called out their near-infinite ability to be spread
| around.
|
| Very useful and interesting class of chemicals.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| What is powder coating paint? Curious so as I can avoid it :)
| m4x wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_coating
|
| It's a common process used to coat all sorts of objects.
| But you don't buy "powder coating paint" and use it
| yourself, it is done in purpose built facilities.
| rrauenza wrote:
| Not a clean room, but reminds me when I was working in a
| partner's small datacenter and found an electrician in there
| using a chop saw on metal conduit.
| maccam912 wrote:
| 6.5 exabytes short? It sounds like a lot, but does someone more
| informed know if that is going to make a dent?
| zinekeller wrote:
| 6.5 million in equivalent 1-terabyte units (note that NAND
| chips tend to be 64-512GB, the unit is just to illustrate
| approximate loss). However, I'm reading it _beyond_ the 6.5
| exabytes since that the WD press release (or any Kioxia
| statement) did not state that the production has been resumed,
| so I 'm assuming it's actually a downtime and not just bad
| chips.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Global flash shipments last year were estimated to be ~600EB,
| so that is ~1%.
| usr1106 wrote:
| So nothing dramatic. Except that there is bad component
| shortage already (no idea whether flash is a bottleneck in
| the general shartage situation)
| kragen wrote:
| https://archive.fo/MQrpR
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| What a happy coincidence. Just as prices of flash memory have
| stabilized.
|
| Manufacturers of commodity parts like storage or LCD panels are
| infamous for price fixing and gouging. All the disasters are
| great excuse for unjustified price hikes.
|
| I remember how a decade ago I was building my PC and HDD prices
| were _painful_.
| oynqr wrote:
| That was because of floods, right?
| Shadonototra wrote:
| yeah, building plants in regions with high seismic activity
| and high flooding potential was for sure the best idea of the
| century
|
| now let's build our new plants in LA, that'll help a lot in
| the future :D
|
| dumb western politicians are responsible of the current
| situation, shame on them for sacrificingmany generations of
| future asian-dependent citizens
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Intel is making the right choice with a fab in ohio. So
| boring, people cannot find it on a map.
| jdrc wrote:
| With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the
| same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like
| they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is
| not as big problem as rumored?
| m4x wrote:
| Just as an aside, a CPU from 2022 will generally be much faster
| and efficient than one from 2014, even if the clock speed is
| similar, due to architecture improvements.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I used to think that about my 2011 laptop as just looking at
| the CPU speeds were not really much faster. however, CPU is
| only a part of the system. GPU/RAM/SSD/etc have seen several
| generational leaps ahead and all add up to an improved
| experience. Also, even though the CPU speeds aren't much
| faster, the transistors in the chips are drastically changing.
| So some bits of code run faster because now they are on the
| chip.
| jeromegv wrote:
| It's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how
| this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow
| down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal
| laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.
| gruturo wrote:
| Indeed a laptop built in 2014 is unaffected by a chip shortage
| in 2020-22.
|
| Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement.
|
| Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a
| dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself
| impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices
| or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a
| replacement if your router just got fried by lightning.
|
| And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would
| find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage
| going on.
| kataklasm wrote:
| How exactly does your old laptop have anything to do with a
| global shortage?
| gambiting wrote:
| I haven't been to the hospital in years, so clearly the news
| about long wait times at the ER are bogus.
| jdrc wrote:
| Well a lot of the demand that creates this shortage is for
| replacement of 'old' phones or laptops which are not truly
| old
| yourusername wrote:
| There are multiple shortages going on. For leading edge
| chips going into phones and GPU's maybe we wait for our
| game console or new phone a few months. But there are also
| shortages for automotive sensors, microcontrollers, power
| delivery controllers. Not buying a new phone isn't going to
| solve the IC shortage for cars or white goods.
| zinekeller wrote:
| The short explanation is that phone and computer chips are
| incompatible with cars (except in Tesla cars where they
| _do_ use some, and even then Tesla cars _still_ use chips
| that are literally have no comparison with computer chips).
|
| The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used
| in phones and computers are different from those used in
| cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a
| bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury
| or even death. Car chips are built to totally different
| standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written
| in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes
| intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you
| need to manually check that everything still works out.
| vultour wrote:
| Their point was that most people already have the technology
| they need, and getting the latest shiniest thing isn't as
| much of an issue.
| speeder wrote:
| Someone crashed my car recently. I had to buy another one (the
| other was impossible to repair).
|
| I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the
| same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years
| ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was
| the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota
| Corolla was literally double the price.
|
| The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars
| I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in
| its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a
| new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards
| and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason
| for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with
| complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars,
| the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic
| dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have
| been literally selling their dashboards to richer people,
| because they now are crazy expensive.
|
| Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of
| truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially
| because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are
| saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the
| government to give them money.
|
| Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip
| shortage made trucks get crazy expensive.
|
| The government also was going to switch the machines used for
| voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines
| would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to
| hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their
| price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage.
|
| The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing
| inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is
| literally disrupting production, changing products, changing
| people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL
| changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the
| leader of 250 million people is chosen!
| jdrc wrote:
| And major crisis, including energy, does that.
| chaosite wrote:
| So this is a major crisis, i.e., a big problem, right?
| op00to wrote:
| Where do you get the idea that trucking is unprofitable? The
| trucking industry has recovered from pandemic downturn and is
| making plenty of profits.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Say you need a new truck. Here's what the market dynamics
| look like: https://www.theverge.com/22923871/carvana-
| pandemic-used-car-...
|
| Say you need your truck fixed. It may take _months_ to get
| the parts needed.
|
| This hasn't played out yet, not even close.
| 627467 wrote:
| Was i the only one expecting to read what was actually the
| contaminant?
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