so much wrong with this title.
- it’s not AI, it’s LLM slop bullshit
- it’s not the software at guilt here, it’s the sacks of shit running those companies who plan such data centers
- blamed? No, those shitheads are totally and absolutely responsible for this clusterfuck.
They’ve gone so far as to claim responsibility.
You mean brag about it?
I was trying to use the same language the news uses when a political group claims resposibilty for a bombing.
I’m glad I bought an 8 TB HDD about a year ago as an investment, it’s now $50 more expensive a year later. I don’t plan on ever filling it up, but it’s been helpful, and good insurance to have if I ever create a project that requires that space.
Apparently there is a huge demand for storage, both RAM and disk. Oh, and GPUs… So what happens when large number of people are looking to buy stuff? In time, I think there is a silver lining here…
Demand went up but supply hasn’t adjusted, and maybe won’t, to meet it. I’d imagine the parts manufacturers would be worried about the bubble bursting as much as we are cheering it on.
I don’t mean existing manufacturers necessarily. Unfortunately there are no certainties, but I’d say give it some time. These chips are (or at the very least becoming) strategic commodities, so the greater the squeeze the more appealing the business case will be. Besides, both the US and EU want to grow their chip manufacturing capacity and it’s not like there is no investment money available. So at some point production capacity will grow.
Don’t discount China in this race either. Gamers nexus did an interesting video about china’s push to become a contender in the DIMM market too.
Guess it’s all speculation for now anyway.
The the demand stays elastic and the supply doesn’t then you can just scale the pricing as much as you want. Saying you’re sold out for the year is literally telling everyone in advance the prices will continue to be manipulated .
I bought a 22tb hdd from serverpartdeals in late December of 2025. Its now $100 more expensive, I’m glad I read the tea leaves in time but this sucks.
Welp, I guess I’m all out of money for new tech. Time to travel or find a new hobby.
I was able to update 2 of 3 devices early last year, but couldn’t upgrade my old custom build. I did that due to possible tariffs; didn’t even think about this “AI” BS. Thought may as well just buy a custom build now. Wanted to wait another year, but I won’t be upset no matter what happens with prices if I get it now. I’m not sure my old girl can outlive the return of easily available PC parts. At least I also bought some extra storage over a year ago.
I’ve two countem two 500gb HDD by WD, starting price is 2500$. And I’ll throw in external cases for 100$ (the cables are blue meaning usb 3.0 a which are 250$)
I’m highly suspect this happens at the same time that Microsoft is demanding you upgrade your PCs to run their shitty software. and discontinuing Windows 10
They need to roll that back.
They want us to rent or compute from the clouds so they can watch each and everything we do.
shit dude I’ll move my storage to S3 and retire on what I can get from my 16tb array and 20tb backup.
no wonder they need so much power/rare earths. ssds next
I get paid on the 27th, I need two more 8TB drives to complete my NAS, my local retailer had 50+ in stock earlier this week, and now the drives are no longer even listed.
Fuck sake…
I bought 2 8TB drives last week and had to check if they were still in stock at the same retailer and they are, but the price have gone up with 23%…
I do see that another retailer has drives in stock, but at about 40-50% more than I paid back in October
I recently checked on the price of the used 12TB server drive I bought a couple years ago. It was 80 then. It’s 260 now. Same seller.
I’m guessing you got similar drives to the ones I got. I paid ~$72 each (4x 12TB), and now the same HGST DC drives from the same seller are $220. Just glad I got them when I did, even though now I have to continually prune the data so it all fits within this forever limit.
Good idea. I just looked at a drive I bought six months ago and it’s up 40% or so. Wish I’d have got two now.
Three months ago I put two 20TB hard drives in my cart for $350 each. This week I had to pull the trigger on them and they were $420 each
1TB SSD I bought at the end of 2024 for $47 is $142 now
12TB HDDs were $104 a piece at the same time and are now $300 each.
So with all the news on hardware shortages…someone is building skynet…and we just don’t know about it.
Less skynet and more a surveillance state thats gonna put England and even CCP to shame.
They need the hard drives because they’re storing everything about us. Every time we drive by a camera, gps paths of our cell phones constant travel, every bank transaction including small purchases, every social media comment, page we view from WiFi or cellphone, all our connections to everyone else, tags for various groups.
Not even just the people we know we know, they’ll know who’s usually next to us in traffic on commutes and when, who makes our sandwich from the deli we go to every other Tuesday, what cops would be most likely to respond to a call to our house at a certain time…
Like, “skynet” is useful because everyone knows the term.
The real danger is what humans will do with access to that much information on everyone, and what a normal human would do to/for a stranger to protect all their darkest secrets.
Imagine if tech was 20 years ahead right now with trump in office, do you think someone like him would hesitate to start wide scale blackmail?
You think they’re above telling a couple thousand people in highly targeted districts that they had to vote a certain a way or else?
It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.
Buy used ETA: and prevent waste
I meant from individuals, not corporations with a profitable refurbishing outfit. e.g.: eBay, thrift shops, the swap shop at your local dump (if you’re lucky to have one), yard sales, etc.
One of my favorite things in life is rescuing hardware from the landfill, or bringing a relative’s dusty old machine back to life. There are still loads of people out there who have never opened a PC case before, and think the whole machine is a loss just because it won’t boot, or is “old”.
Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.
Wild that people were down voting you. Hard drives can last decades and are replaced from enterprise servers long before they’re close to failing.
Especially with lowered use compared to a server, you won’t see much functional difference between brand new consumer grade and used server grade.
Pretty sure caches and everything are better on used server grade still anyways.
deleted by creator
Yeah I’d imagine you’d have trouble finding a good deal there. I’ve had way more luck getting drives from eBay, thrift shops, yard sales and the local dump.
Also by convincing everyone I know to just give me their old stuff that they think is no longer useful. They don’t want it taking up space anyway, and I get to harvest the useful bits and add them to my frankensteined home lab, then responsibly dispose of the rest. There have also been several machines I’ve acquired this way that I’ve repaired/made whole again, then provided to those who need them.
For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise…
However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it.
It’s honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days…
Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.
So to clarify, what’s good is:
A product that was sent back to manufacturer and “manufacturer refurbished” meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it’s still working
Pretty much anything else, would be bad.
An example of what is bad is:
“Amazon/ebay refurbished” where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.
Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that’s where we can find deals.
I think I’ve got a 1TB that’s ~20 years old I got that way. It’s still technically in my main PC, but at this point it’s an unimportant archive drive that just doesn’t get read or wrote very often.
I’ve just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don’t know why people act like they’re disposable parts of a PC still.
My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base
Yeah, it’s just typical capitalism stuff.
People see talk about legit refurbs and then think a dust wipe refurb isnthe same thing and get ripped off.
The worst part is that we don’t something, and by saying something, I mean boycott them.
Look what they are doing to us, just to build AI data centers.
Worst part, is that there is no progress of AI. It is used only for capitalist profits by companies(support chat bots, girlfriend AI and goes on).\
