[HN Gopher] First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant susp...
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First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card
sales
Author : _tk_
Score : 68 points
Date : 2026-03-29 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mashable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mashable.com)
| il wrote:
| Why isn't production scaling to meet demand? Shouldn't the market
| address this.
| sosborn wrote:
| Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.
| helterskelter wrote:
| 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.
| smallerize wrote:
| A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.
| analognoise wrote:
| Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| USA tried this with the CHIPS act
| pjc50 wrote:
| > just a few million dollars
|
| TSMC 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.
| dspillett wrote:
| Who is going to pay for a non-cutting-edge fab that might
| be completely out of date relatively soon though?
| mike50 wrote:
| Automotive, space and defense happily use older processes
| at scale. Also embedded electronics in all sorts of
| electronics.
| dspillett wrote:
| Yes, but that isn't where the increase in demand is.
| Those things are affected by fabs that could be producing
| them producing something else, but there will be some
| stock floating in the system so some resistance to
| increased prices needed to justify new fab resource, and
| if things correct a bit in the coming year the maths for
| a new build might look more dubious. Those with the money
| to fund a new fab right now are more likely to fund
| something capable of producing the newer part types. I
| could be wrong, but the fact that significant new fabs
| like that are not in progress right now would suggest
| not.
| scrlk wrote:
| TI started production at their SM1 fab back in December
| 2025, which focuses on 28 nm to 130 nm.
| pfortuny wrote:
| It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations
| than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale
| ones.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists
| always tell us is magic?
| FpUser wrote:
| 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).
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| 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.
| eschneider wrote:
| Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line,
| you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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.
| HerbManic wrote:
| No 4 is why nobody is willing to really move on new
| fascilities.
|
| China is doing it but that was for merely creating tech
| independence.
| rolandog wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why not normalize that, if things don't work out, the
| government steps in, buys the business, and offers a better
| regulated version of the business?
|
| Capitalism is generally touted as useful for innovation; but
| haven't we paid collectively for the initial investment for
| many businesses many times over now that there's little
| innovation done? By definition there's no innovation once the
| only thing happening in a business sector is consolidation.
|
| So, I'd conclude that capitalism isn't useful to us at that
| point, and actually harmfully inefficient (too costly for
| consumers), so we'd be wise to do away with it by that point
| in favor of a more efficiently run operational/economic
| system... That would actually be innovative! What that system
| looks like, I'm not sure, but I imagine it's something like a
| cooperative.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| And to add to that 4th point, there is a very real chance
| that many the "AI" companies that are buying all this
| hardware could go bankrupt at anytime and in rapid
| succession, leaving drive/memory manufactures with a bunch of
| unpaid orders and a second hand market now saturated with
| liquidated equipment.
|
| Much like the GPU/crypto boom/bust some years ago, but on an
| even larger scale.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Free markets, yes
| dspillett wrote:
| Production was close to maximum anyway because of existing
| demand and how expensive new fabs are to bring up. The boom in
| AI use wasn't sufficiently planned for as it wasn't expected at
| the scale we are seeing, so to scale up means building more
| fabs - a long and expensive task. The situation is not helped
| by one of the AI companies successfully negotiating huge deals
| for a year worth of production with the two biggest providers
| at the same time and keeping it secret enough that neither
| bumped up prices in the deal as a result of knowing what the
| play was.
| PowerElectronix wrote:
| Adding to what others have said, several hdd, ssd and ram
| manufactures have said that they don't believe demand will be
| sustained in time for long enough to warrant extra investments
| in increasing production.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Most players are rational actors and this isn't their first
| time in this sort of market. Getting more production online if
| you do not have slack like downtime takes quite a while. And
| there is no guarantee that they can sell the new production
| even at previous rates if they end up in over supply.
|
| Generally people just don't understand how long ramping up new
| production facilities can take and what is the realistic pay
| off period for them.
| red_admiral wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was
| covered by warranty.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| HerbManic wrote:
| It makes sense, at the time you bought them there was no
| supply crunch plus being run in RAID. Would have been a
| decent deal.
|
| Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the
| old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for
| the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning
| platters.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walterbell wrote:
| GenAI and/or smart glasses video? WD already sold their
| entire 2026 production of nearline drives for data centers.
| epistasis wrote:
| I've seen lots of articles on HN of AI startups building
| massive drive arrays for mass storage.
|
| AI runs on data above all else. Gotta feed the compute.
| dspillett wrote:
| I have a home array too, though based on 4Tb drives (6x, two
| lots of RAID10, one 3x4T one 3x6T, linked as an LVM volume as I
| extended it by adding the second array some time ago).
|
| I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't
| need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much
| lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought
| the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I
| just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they
| all work when I do finally get around to it...
| buildbot wrote:
| I believe many sellers an eBay are illegally manipulating the
| market, and eBay is tacitly helping them by ignoring and
| removing feedback.
|
| For example this seller: https://www.ebay.com/str/disctechllc
|
| "Accidentally miss-priced" a bunch of drives, and then instead
| of canceling the orders, refunded everyone, but still shipped
| packages:
| https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...
|
| I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge
| import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the "26" sold
| on their listings that are now astronomically priced:
| https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT
|
| Edit: They also lied on their customs declarations (!)
| tombert wrote:
| Holy shit, they want three grand for a 3.84TB drive. That's
| absurd.
| buildbot wrote:
| Yep, and it looks like they sold 26 at that price - which
| they did not. They sold 26 at 10x less or so.
| rolandog wrote:
| Yeah, totally agree. I believe that the axing of several
| anti-monopoly enforcement departments and regulations in the
| largest market in the world (the US) is effectively a very
| big wink wink, nudge nudge to market participants; Trump
| basically got to play as Oprah for Big Businesses everywhere:
| "You get to be a cartel! You get to be a cartel! Everybody
| gets to be a cartel!"
|
| He's basically created a sort of one-sided economic "Ferry
| Ordeal" (like the Joker on The Dark Knight [1]), basically
| leaving us consumers to not be exploited only if there are
| decent men at the helm of big businesses. It could be
| asymmetrical instead of one-sided if you consider that the
| people can only tolerate so much squeezing before they start
| clamoring for guillotines [2].
|
| [1]: https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Ferry_Ordeal_and_Skyscrap
| er_B...
|
| [2]: https://youtu.be/TMHCw3RqulY
| storus wrote:
| I've recently bought 3x32TB (new) and 2x28TB (recertified)
| drives for a new NAS as my old one started running out of space
| on some drives (local LLMs and datasets or media for dataset
| preparations are huge these days) as I expect the prices to go
| up considerably due to most HDD manufacturers being booked
| years in advance already. Some drives don't even make it to
| retail at all (44TB Seagate).
| whatever1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| xbmcuser wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| A bit tangential: it's narratives like this which can create
| sudden crashes on the stock market.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Speculation at some point meets reality. This is when market
| crashes.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| So, your proof is that some dire predictions in the past,
| about other things, by other people, were sometimes true?
| whatever1 wrote:
| I am not even predicting something.
|
| The global oil & gas supply has been disrupted and cannot
| recover overnight as actual infrastructure is gone.
|
| Someone will need to reduce consumption.
|
| These are just facts and physics of supply & demand.
|
| We can always debate on who will get hit more or what
| resources will be affected more.
| cpursley wrote:
| Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The scariest one is the
| fertilizer situation which means less productive harvests,
| which means hunger.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Because it's whataboutism which is basically propaganda. It
| doesn't add anything to the discussion, and if we put too
| much emphasis on other unrelated (but still important)
| issues, the site wouldn't exist at all.
|
| Example: Why are you posting here when you could be solving
| world hunger? Don't you care about starving children?
| ranger_danger wrote:
| why are chefs baking bread? there's buildings to construct.
| profsummergig wrote:
| Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go
| all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first facility to
| begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory
| chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? And just an assembly and
| testing facility? To me that seemed like an easy cop-out. To me
| (my admittedly naive self), wafer fabs and CPUs seemed like the
| real game.
|
| Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost
| seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing
| commercial shipments now).
|
| Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi
| has some of that too.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Just opened this year, apparently:
| https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-deta...
| ufmace wrote:
| I would think if you're a developing country looking to build
| some domestic semiconductor manufacturing expertise, it'd
| probably be best to start with something on the easier side.
| Something with closer to well-known and standard tech that can
| still be sold on the open market.
| profsummergig wrote:
| This was exactly their thinking. Build an ecosystem by
| starting with easier things, and progressively doing more
| difficult things.
| mike50 wrote:
| It's just an attempt to copy Taiwan and the Philippines by
| starting with the labor intensive low value add part of
| semiconductor manufacturing.
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