Ransomware assault on Toshiba means 400,000TB of SSD storage is lacking

Toshiba make plenty of the world’s NAND flash reminiscence – the kind of stuff that goes into your SSD and cellphone, not your PC’s system reminiscence – and by having to close down their Japanese manufacturing amenities for that lengthy it means we missed out on 100,000 wafers. With some back-of-the-napkin maths that will quantity to round 50,000,000 lacking chips, or a possible 400,000TB of SSD cupboard space that was by no means born.

Sad occasions.

There are solely six actual producers of NAND flash – Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, Micron, SanDisk and Toshiba. Those final two have a joint manufacturing deal happening, so it’s doubtless SanDisk manufacturing could have been hit too. Any manufacturing hiccups like this will have a lot broader penalties on the already tight world provide of reminiscence, and that might find yourself driving costs even increased than they already are. I blame Apple. Though that’s my inventory response to plenty of issues…

We have been hoping that NAND flash provide was on the up and that subsequent 12 months we’d see the night out of SSD pricing specifically, however with this assault on Toshiba’s manufacturing the knock on impact is more likely to put that on maintain, a minimum of within the brief time period.

Still, it’s not all doom and gloom for the beleaguered reminiscence division of Toshiba. Reports are surfacing today that a main personal fairness agency is main a consortium to purchase Toshiba Memory and that they’re promising to offer round $9bn for R&D and funding. 

“We will not be stingy in offering additional support,” Bain Capital’s MD, Yuji Sugimoto informed The Nikkei. “We will not be frugal when it comes to investing in people either. No cutback in the number of employees is being considered, and there may even be an increase.”

Fingers crossed meaning we’ll see some attention-grabbing SSD advances subsequent 12 months from each Toshiba and their extra gaming-focused model OCZ. Remember OCZ? Yeah, their SSDs are much more dependable now they’re constructed by Toshiba…