Thursday, October 27, 2011

Thailand flooding could cause serious downtime in your office

Western Digital has announced their primary manufacturing facilities in Thailand are flooded with some equipment submerged.  Their secondary plant there is also threatened by approaching flood waters.  They expect that the damages to these plants will have significant impact on the company's ability to meet demand in fourth quarter.

Other hard drive companies, such as Seagate, are also reporting production problems due to the floods effect on other production components also made in Thailand.

Flooding of Bang Pa Industrial Park home of Western Digital

How can this cause downtime for you?

  • Hard drive failures can happen at any time.  Even if your data is completely backed up, you can't do anything with that backup if you don't have a hard drive, that works, where you can restore the data.  It could take several days or even WEEKS to replace a failed drive as inventories drop.
  • All of you with computers that are 3 years old (or older) have hard drives that are reaching the end of their life.  You are more likely to experience a failure than those with computers under 2 years old.
  • If you have to buy a new computer to replace an old one that dies, it is possible that by December you could end up waiting on back ordered computers simply because hard drives can't be found to build a new machine.


What can you do about it now to prevent being affected by this problem?

  • Check your backup and make sure that you have everything you need backed up.  Lack of a backup will only make things harder in any drive failure situation.
  • Run hard drive diagnostics to determine if bad results and errors are already showing up on your current drives so you can be proactive and replace the drive NOW.
  • Make sure you have a spare computer in your office.  It may not be the best solution for a drive or computer failure but at least you will have something to use while this problem works itself out.  The spare should be set up so that it can be a replacement for any other machine.  
  • If you have several old computers then you should probably have more than one spare machine.
  • If your computer is over 3 years old and you can't live for weeks without one, go ahead and replace the whole machine now.
  • If you had planned to purchase computers and install them in this fiscal year, don't wait until December to place your order.  
Kardon Technology can help you with all these tasks.  Contact us today!

The heat extremes during the summer caused a lot of damage to hard drives.  We have seen an increase in failures within our client base over the last few months.  Losing a drive is stressful and causes downtime in most small businesses even if they have everything backed up.  Image if you have no way to load that data to get access to it for weeks!  


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