Thieves drive off with 10,800 Western Digital drives

Brass-necked thieves stole 10,800 Western Digital disk drives from Kuala Lumpur international airport on Sunday by simply driving away a lorry. According to the New Straits Times the eight-tonne lorry, loaded with 524 boxes of drives worth about 1.7 million Singapore dollars, was parked in a forwarding agent's area in the …

[Anonymous Coward]

RAID?

come on, theres gotta be a few puns involving hard drives and RAID ! :-)

[Steve Loughran]

that's 10 petabytes then

Assuming these were 1TB drives, that's about 10-11 PB of data. If they were newer, 2TB drives, that's 20-22 Petabytes of storage. Maybe they were just trying to build their own datacentre?

[Dante]

title

I wonder if they'll RAID them?

[W. Keith Wingate]

The joke is on them

The forwarding agent's security and that of the airport seem to be a bit of a joke. ®

Ya think? It's a pity they weren't seagate, I could use some cheap drives.... :-).

[Anonymous Coward]

My bet is

If they we're smart, hadn't got caught, they'd be heading for the stock exchange next, looking for high speed fiber connections, a couple of hookers, a bag of dope, and some creative monetary python scripting.

1.7Mil ain't nothing compared to the "legal theft" happening around the world.

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What was that sound? Oh yeah 10 mil siphoned off 100 mil in two minutes.

[Lionel Baden]

oh well

I was just typing in ebay when i read the rest of the story !!

[Christoph]

What's the bandwidth ...

... of a truck with 10,800 disk drives?

There's an old quote about never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes, but that must be even better.

[Anonymous Coward]

surprised

im surprised they didn't drive them straight back again when they noticed they were western digital drives

[Swallowtail]

Wow...

If they're 2TB each, then that's 21PB of storage space.

That makes me quite jealous...

[regadpellagru]

EMC ?

"Thieves drive off with 10,800 Western Digital drives"

That'd be EMC, for sure !

[Marvin the Martian]

Joke security?

On both sides then --- the organized crime looks a bit pathetic if the police immediately solve the crime, finding the disks in question. It seems that better security would lead to better criminals and hence persistent losing of disks instead of this temporary misplacement?

[Mike Hunt 1]

Lucky old thieves.......

Could have been worse! Could have stolen some decent quality Hard Drives. 10800 drives minus all the faulty ones = about 3MB of capacity. Useful as paperweights though !

You would almost get the feeling that I don't like Western Digital wouldn't you

[NoneSuch]

RAID? No, its JBOD... ;)

>You would almost get the feeling that I

>don't like Western Digital wouldn't you

Almost. Not like the gut wrenching feeling I get when I discover a WD drive in my servers though.

Locked doors and security only keep out honest men.

[Wallyb132]

Its funny..

Your comment comes the day after i spend the entire day chasing the parts needed to make a serial cable to communicate with and debrick a seagate 7200.11 drive thanks to seagate's wonderful firmware bug.

Unfortunately the bricked drive belonged to my best friends mother, so the work was pro bono, including the cost of the parts...

Long live Western Digital!!

[Anonymous Coward]

oompa loompas?

those chocolate factory fiends didn't want to pay full price for their next data - mining project, i mean codified collections

[Dennis SMith]

Airport security

Security at ALL airports is a joke. Given the volume of travelers, employees, and maintenance personnel, true security is just an illusion.

[GeekyGirl]

10080 WDs?

Clearly not technophiles then...

[John Tserkezis]

They *thought* it was an inside job?

It took them two hours to realise an entire truck was missing in an environment where the keys are obviously easily accessible?

And this obviously makes it an inside job? A casual passer-by could have done it.

I know it *was* an inside job, but the point is, with that lax security, what were they expecting?

[Frank Haney]

£75 a drive?

That sounds like retail price. At that point in the distribution chain I'd be surprised if they were worth more than £10 each.

It's like when the customs nab a drug smuggler with £1000 worth of cocaine and it morphs into a "street value" of £1 million.

Paris, 'cos even she would be able to do the math (sic).

[C 2]

WDC or worse Seagate

Like someone said, about 3MB of useful capacity after the defective drives, they might have gotten a whole 6MB if they'd nicked Seagate drives.

If they knew what they where doing, they'd have swiped a truckload of Samsung drives, which BTW aren't RAID crippled.