Replacement and repair of this equipment should provide at least a short term revenue opportunity for companies such as KLA-Tencor, Flexstar, Teradyne and Xyratex as well as a host of other component and hard disk drive assembly and test equipment companies .

FORBES: Capital Equipment Likely Needed for Thailand HDD Factory Repairs

The secret to packing that much information on such small real estate--about 15 times denser than the densest data storage device currently in existence--is self-assembly, or tricking the disk's materials into organizing into an array of data-storing dots packed far tighter than what could be accomplished with current techniques.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The ferocious seasonal rains that hit the country in October 2011 caused massive flooding which disrupted the production of hard disk drives, cameras, microchips and automotive parts and assembly plants.

FORBES: Thai Power Woes Threaten Tech Supply Chain; How To Respond

Getting to that stage might mean combining self-assembly methods with lithography, or doing away with the head that reads the data-packed disk and instead creating a self-assembling solid-state system on the model of Flash memory storage used today.

FORBES: Magazine Article