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Possible NAND Shortage


bgelfand

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I just saw this article about a problem at Western Digital's NAND foundry

 

LINK: Factory contamination affects “at least” 7 billion gigabytes of flash memory | Ars Technica

 

6.5 exabytes of NAND has been contaminated and is scrapped. According to Blumberg it may be over twice that amount. Coupled with Samsung closing a NAND factory in China due to COVID and we may have a shortage of data cards for cameras as well as flash drives and SSDs.

 

The contaminated NAND is enough to make 7 billion 1GB cards or 28 billion 256 GB cards. Of course, the reduction will not just be flash cards; it will be spread over SSDs, and phones as well as other device that uses NAND memory.

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Western Digital owns SanDisk. Get ProGrade, Lexar, Sony, Delkin ....

 

I do not believe ProGrade, Lexar, Sony, or Delkin manufacture their own NAND chips. They use chips manufactured by other to make the cards. The large NAND manufacturers are Samsung, Kioxia (use to be Toshiba), SK Hynix, WDC (SanDisk also sources from Kioxia), and Micron. Intel sold their NAND business to SK Hynix last year. When the two largest manufacturers, Samsung and Kioxia, have production problems it stresses the NAND supply chain. ProGrade, Lexar, Sony, and Delkin may not be able to get enough chips to make their cards. At very least prices should increase.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not long ago, I tried to buy an 8GB microSD card, but they are hard to find.

I ended up with 32GB. (That was to load new firmware onto a Nook HD.)

 

I suspect that won't change the supply of CF cards much, either.

 

How many 1TB cards do you need?

-- glen

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For fun, I just checked B&H's web site. They are listing the SanDisk 128G CFexpress Type B card at $250, which is inflated, but there is current a $130 discount, which is over 50%. I did try to put it in the shopping card. The final cost is $120 plus sales tax.

 

The SanDisk CFx is on the slow side and could be out of favor, but there is clearly no shortage.

 

This is the link in case someone is interested:

SanDisk 128GB Extreme PRO CFexpress Card Type B

 

SanDisk_20220302.thumb.jpg.9775d408e16fefd3f92279c054c76891.jpg

Edited by ShunCheung
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For fun, I just checked B&H's web site. They are listing the SanDisk 128G CFexpress Type B card at $250, which is inflated, but there is current a #130 discount, which is over 50%. I did try to put it in the shopping card. The final cost is $120 plus sales tax.

 

(snip)

 

I notice that they also offer 6 month financing.

-- glen

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Interesting. I'd have thought there was a degree of time relevance to high value memory chip supply, not quite like flowers, but....;)

 

This is the problem with supply chain.

 

As long as they are going in one end, and coming out the other end, it doesn't so much matter how long it takes in between.

 

But when that process breaks down, we notice.

-- glen

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