Contamination Costs Western Digital at Least 6.5 Exabytes of Flash Storage
If component shortages weren't bad enough already, they look set to get worse for anyone looking to buy a new SSD.
As Tom's Hardware reports, Western Digital and Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) have been working in partnership to manufacture memory chips for the past two decades. However, yesterday it was announced that they have been forced to cease production at two NAND factories, located in the Japanese cities of Kiakami and Tokkaichi. The stoppage is due to "contamination of certain material used in its manufacturing processes."
The contamination is set to reduce the availability of flash memory by at least 6.5 exabytes (6,979,321,856 gigabytes), according to Western Digital. The memory being produced at these factories is 3D BiCS flash, which is used in a wide-range of devices as well as for SSDs.
Both companies are working together to "restore the facilities to normal operational status as quickly as possible." It's currently unclear how the contamination happened, which material it is, and how long it will take to rectify. With supply channels still under heavy pressure due to the pandemic, the delay in restarting production may end up being because replacement uncontaminated material takes awhile to source.
Combined, Western Digital and Kioxia accounted for nearly 24% of the world's SSD capacity last year. Therefore, an extended period of downtime caused by this incident may result in SSD prices spiking simply because there's even less supply to meet the already very high demand.
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