First Western Digital, now Sony: The tech giant suspends SD card sales
54 points - today at 5:14 PM
SourceI 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.
dspillett
today at 7:36 PM
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…
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 even don't make it to retail at all (44TB Seagate).
bluerooibos
today at 6:45 PM
Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.
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
today at 8:08 PM
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
today at 7:08 PM
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
today at 7:31 PM
GenAI and/or smart glasses video? WD already sold their entire 2026 production of nearline drives for data centers.
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.
epistasis
today at 7:55 PM
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.
profsummergig
today at 7:08 PM
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.
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
today at 7:54 PM
This was exactly their thinking. Build an ecosystem by starting with easier things, and progressively doing more difficult things.
It's just an attempt to copy Taiwan and the Philippines by starting with the labor intensive low value add part of semiconductor manufacturing.
Why isn't production scaling to meet demand?
Shouldn't the market address this.
miki123211
today at 6:34 PM
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
today at 8:11 PM
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.
eschneider
today at 6:34 PM
Because when the AI customers explode N months down the line, you don't want to be on the hook for a new factory.
dspillett
today at 7:26 PM
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
today at 8:23 PM
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.
Building production facilities isn't like flipping a switch.
helterskelter
today at 5:55 PM
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.
It is the law of inertia, it applies to many more situations than we think. Markets is one of the, especially large-scale ones.
littlecranky67
today at 6:26 PM
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.
smallerize
today at 5:55 PM
A chip fab costs a billion dollars to build.
analognoise
today at 6:01 PM
Modern cutting edge ones, yes. Not all fabs, by a long shot.
dspillett
today at 7:27 PM
Who is going to pay for a non-cutting-edge fab that might be completely out of date relatively soon though?
TI started production at their SM1 fab back in December 2025, which focuses on 28 nm to 130 nm.
Automotive, space and defense happily use older processes at scale. Also embedded electronics in all sorts of electronics.
Imustaskforhelp
today at 6:27 PM
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?
> 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.
spencerflem
today at 7:09 PM
USA tried this with the CHIPS act
downrightmike
today at 6:43 PM
Free markets, yes
cyanydeez
today at 6:20 PM
Why isn't magic just doing the magic things the capitalists always tell us is magic?
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).
red_admiral
today at 6:15 PM
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
today at 6:51 PM
Earlier today I discovered the existence of 2TB microsd cards
whatever1
today at 7:07 PM
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.
A bit tangential: it’s narratives like this which can create sudden crashes on the stock market.
whatever1
today at 8:26 PM
Speculation at some point meets reality. This is when market crashes.
So, your proof is that some dire predictions in the past, about other things, by other people, were sometimes true?
whatever1
today at 8:48 PM
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.
ranger_danger
today at 8:22 PM
why are chefs baking bread? there's buildings to construct.
hall0ween
today at 7:11 PM
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?
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.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The scariest one is the fertilizer situation which means less productive harvests, which means hunger.
ranger_danger
today at 8:32 PM
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?