Sounds like somebody had a really bad day at work, as Western Digital reports that “factory contamination” caused a batch of flash memory chips to be spoiled. How much, you ask? Oh, only about 7 billion gigabytes! For those of you fond of SI prefixes, that’s 7 exabytes of storage; to put that into perspective, it’s seven times what Google used for Gmail storage in 2012, and enough to store approximately 1.69 trillion copies of Project Gutenberg’s ASCII King James Version Bible. Very few details were available other than the unspecified contamination of two factories, but this stands poised to cause problems with everything from flash drives to phones to SSDs, and will probably only worsen the ongoing chip shortage. And while we hate to be cynical, it’ll probably be prudent to watch out for any “too good to be true” deals on memory that pop up on eBay and Ali in the coming months.
Speaking of broken stuff, we came across a site called FailScout, which purports to be “a crowdsourced database of broken and worn-out products.” The idea apparently is to document cases of what appears to be either systematic manufacturing defects, engineering problems, or outright planned obsolescence. The goal of this is ostensibly to hold manufacturers accountable for their products, but we can see how this could just devolve into a morass of ax-grinding by people who have unreasonable expectations about how long products should last. Yes, pretty much everything we buy is subject to “value engineering” decisions in terms of materials and designs, and some of that will no doubt send products to the landfill long before their time. But when someone is complaining a ..
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