Hope they backed up their data – Thailand flooding

Thai girl walking through flood water
A Thai girl wades through a flooded alleyway near the Chao Phraya River, in Bangkok on Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2010.

 

All kidding aside, Thailand has been getting rocked by some major flooding in the past month. For those of you who haven’t heard, and I’m going to assume that’s most of you, the flooding started roughly around the middle of July and has been since. Media coverage has been lighter than when tragedy struck Japan andvthe public conscious hasn’t been wrapped up in it anywhere near as much. There are a number of reasons I can think of, but none of them are the point of this piece. So why talk about how flooded Thailand is right now?

Thailand is underwater AND the second largest producer of magnetic hard drives.

Do you see the problem now? I’ve read that Reuters predicts that as stock dwindles, prices could rise anywhere from 20-40% by the year’s end (like this article here). Which is bullocks because a quick trip to Newegg will reveal a different story, albeit much worse. Prices for magnetic or traditional hard drives have already gone up more than 100%. Terabyte drives that were priced around $55 during the end of August are now priced roughly at $130. Its like we’ve been transplanted back to 2009.

Western Digital plant flooded
The Western Digital plant in Thailand aka this is why hard drive are sky rocketing

Here are some things that you can do to help yourself :

  1. Back up all of your important data on to a hard drive that doesn’t see regular use. Drive may not last forever, but sure as spit last longer the less they get used.
  2. Power down your drives: see above
  3. Stream more content: if you’re keeping content locally, then that’s less content you need to backup
  4. Un-man the torrents: again, the less content you’re keeping locally, the less you need to be concerned about disk space. Also, there’s only so many times you can download Ubuntu, so we know those aren’t legal torrents you’re running.

 

So we’re encouraging everyone to help in whatever way possible. Donate to the red cross or salvation army or any of these relief agencies (list of links) . Or if you have an idea of what people can do, either say something in th comments or let us know directly and we’ll share your idea.

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