The cost of flash storage could increase in the future due to a power outage in Japan. Western Digital and Toshiba were affected (via Business Wire).
Power Outage
On June 15 a power outage occurred in the Yokkaichi region in Japan. This affected production at hard drive fabs operated by Toshiba and Western Digital. The companies are working to bring them to normal operational status as soon as possible, but the cost of hard drives could rise because of the shortage.
Western Digital continues to assess the impact of this event. The company currently expects the incident will result in a reduction of Western Digital’s flash wafer availability of approximately 6 exabytes, the majority of which is expected to be contained in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020.
Apple is an owner of Toshiba Memory, along with others like Dell, Seagate, SK Hynix, and Kingston. According to BusinessKorea, Toshiba’s loss was estimated around 30,000 to 100,000 silocon wafers, representing 10% to 25% of its monthly NAND production.
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