Western Digital Applies Machine Learning To Its Hard Drive Manufacturing Operations
As industry 4.0 technologies continues to transform the manufacturing industry, machines are executing an increasing proportion of factory operations.
While this was an intimidating prospect when these technologies first emerged, manufacturers quickly learned the significant benefits they yield in terms of productivity and profitability. This becomes increasingly apparent during the pandemic when manufacturing innovation reaches new heights.
Implementation is never easy however, and many smaller brands will be looking to their larger competitors for cues on how to best leverage the power of industry 4.0 technologies.
Western Digital
One such brand can be found in the form of American computer hard disk drive manufacturer and data storage company, Western Digital.
As one of the largest manufacturers of hard disk drives, SSDs, and flash memory devices, Western Digital knew it had to think outside of the box when it came to its own digital transformation.
“When Western Digital started its Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) efforts, no one was eager to let machine learning take over factory floors,” said the company in a blog post. “Manufacturing millions of storage units is a complex operation. Hard disk drives have hundreds of components and design parameters many times smaller than the width of human DNA. One small mistake can lead to thousands of defunct units or bring production to a halt. Letting algorithms take over the production line seemed risky.
Western Digital started small, with an innovative testing process to discover whether machine learning algorithms could bring together a range of variables to predict hard-drive health. Just a few months after beginning the process, the team responsible for 4IR at Western Digital had advanced algorithms analyzing more than 2,000 separate variables, which they confirmed could accurately and reliably point to a hard drive’s health condition in real time.
Once these algorithms were deployed at the manufacturing level, testing and optimization processes could be customized for each product being produced, and led to a 15% increase in production line testing efficiency.
Scaling Up Implementation
It’s important to remember that we’re not just talking about memory storage devices for home computers , but the vast number of hard drives utilized by some of the world’s biggest tech companies such as search engine providers, social media networks, and cloud storage giants. Once you start thinking in this kind of scale, the need for efficient testing becomes all too clear.
“Enterprise hard drives are where the ginormous data of the digital economy lives,” continues Western Digital. “Cloud giants maintain so much data that they buy hard drives in the thousands, tens of thousands, and some even hundreds of thousands. The world’s largest cloud companies can deploy a million drives. Any quality issue for these titans is both a potential disaster to their services and a gargantuan headache. Imagine having to service 30,000 data center components.”
The Western Digital factory in Thailand produces more than one 100,000 enterprise grade hard drives daily. This rate of production is only possible if testing is done at the same rate.
However, testing slots are spread over enormous, automated machines. If just 0.5% of those slots report an error with a hard drive, that’s more than 6,000 machines that an employee has to locate and tend to. And that’s before the hard drive arrives at the lab to discover what’s gone wrong.
With machine learning algorithms doing the heavy lifting, Western Digital can now connect its vast swath of independent machines into a single connected network. Testers can access real-time data regarding the devices being analyzed and address issues remotely. Those same algorithms have also since learned how to pinpoint root cause issues and automatically perform self-healing operations.
"AI, analytics, and automation have been a gamechanger," concluded the company. "They have helped improved hard drive reliability and increased enterprise SSD quality eightfold. Altogether, the successful implementation of 4IR technologies saves Western Digital hundreds of millions of dollars every year. These achievements have not gone unnoticed. The company’s HDD factory in Thailand and its flash manufacturing site in Malaysia were recognized by the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network."
Final Thoughts
Digital trailblazers such as Western Digital are showing that Industry 4.0 technologies can make operations run more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Productivity is key to an operation such as Western Digital’s, and its use of machine learning technology to connect testing devices and supercharge output is nothing short of inspired.
Learn more at Connected Manufacturing Forum 2022, being held in July at the Rancho Bernardo Inn, San Diego, CA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.