Western Digital has temporarily suspended disk drive-related production in its Thailand sites close to Bangkok due to severe flooding.

Flooding in Thailand is sparking transportation and utility infrastructure headaches with some supply facilities and peoples' homes inundated.

WD has some 37,000 employees in its Thai facilities and they are all safe. These employees helped WD ship around 54 million hard disk drives from its plants in Thailand and Malaysia in the quarter, which finished on 1 July, 2011, with about 32.5 million coming from Thailand.

The company expects supply of disk drives in this quarter to be constrained because of the flooding and is doing its best to work around the problems with its suppliers. The production facilities are operational but production has stopped to enable the facilities to be protected against rising water.

WD says the situation is pretty fast-moving and conditions in Thailand may well change. ®