WD & Toshiba Lose 6 Exabytes Of NAND Due To Power Outage

Power outages are a constant threat in our lives, sometimes striking at the most inopportune moment. We actually encountered this yesterday night, while two PCs were in full benchmark mode, and another was busy compiling performance data. In our case, the outage was inconvenient, especially on the office PC that had a handful of Excel files and myriad folders open. But soon after, the outage was forgotten about.

In the case of big companies, such as WD and Toshiba, power outages can have much more dire side-effects. This is being evidenced right now, following a power outage which occurred in Japan’s Yokkaichi province. All told, the outage lasted 13 minutes, which seems meager in the grand scheme. In the case of this NAND production, however, the ultimate loss is upwards of 6 exabytes. That’s 1,000 petabytes, which itself is 1,000 terabytes.

It’s incredible to hear of so much storage lost in one go, but it’s likewise incredible to know that such destruction was caused by a fairly short outage. To put this into perspective, ExtremeTech reports that 6EB is half of WD’s quarterly production. A disruption of a month-and-a-half is going to feel painful for the company.

For consumers wondering if this outage will result in SSD prices going up, we’re likely safe for a while, since the market has been loaded with supply. If we’re not at the point yet where people can start buying SSDs for secondary storage, we should be there soon. Crucial has a decently spec’d 1TB NVMe SSD for a mere $110. It really wasn’t too long ago when the market was waiting for SSD prices to drop below $1 per GB, and here we’re seeing $0.10 per GB being closed-in on.

It’s expected that WD and Toshiba’s NAND production isn’t going to resume until mid-July, when it’s assured that such disaster can’t strike a second time. We can only imagine how much power these factories drain when whatever backup power was in place wasn’t enough to account for for a relatively short outage.