Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim

It’s a cascade effect. Memory pricing went up -> Increased price of SSD with DRAM cache -> Increased pricing of DRAM-less SSDs after demand shifted -> HDDs became significantly more cost effective again as a storage device but now the demand for them increased so price went up for them as well.

2 months ago I’ve got Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB for 235€ now that’s the price of 2TB and the 4TB is almost 400€.

I’ve got 8TB Seagate Exos 7E10 8TB for 182€ in May now it’s almost 260€.

We’re fucked…

Yeah right, if they're buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they're doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.

Storage capacity for datacenters and other data-hungry business operations (think YouTube scale).

Current alternatives don't reach the same capacity per dollar without caveats (magnetic tape has an incredibly slow seek time and SSDs are too expensive for non-cache usage).

Of course, AI data harvesting is essentially creating artificial (sorry) demand for even more data capacity, and it doesn't make rational sense for them to use other forms of hardware.

Fun fact - the scale of data involved is so great that Google famously used "sneakernets" (give an employee a backpack of hard drives and tell them to go from A to B) over traditional internet or intranet connections between their larger facilities in the 2010s, because it was faster.

All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.

Proxmox cluster and shuck externals I started during the 2008 crash this is how I'd do budget HL

If it's for a homelab or small project refurbished models are still a good deal but you should hurry, my vendor is running low on hardware that was sitting for years.. I got an R630 (40 cores, 64Gb RAM) on offer a few months ago for peanuts...

honestly servers don’t need the latest hardware: just build using DDR4 (or even DDR3): it’s half the price per GB or less each step down, and honestly the biggest reason you want RAM in a server is for a ZFS cache, which is going to be bottlenecked on plenty of other things far before your RAM speed (IMO; i’ve done exactly 0 testing)

(though the max size of a DDR3 module is 8GB so on most consumer hardware that will limit you to 32GB total)

I should have bought more DDR5 when I first built mine. I figured I'd be able to add more later so I just focused on a good CPU...

NOT UNTIL they are done recording profits and laying off people constantly. until they run out of people to "fire:

Just finished ripping about 150 of our DVD collection and space was filling up, went looking for HDDs and was surprised at the prices. Now I know why.

I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more... 😭

I have an invention that.. well, you be the judge; What if we take some cheap paper.. and put holes in it ? If we place the holes in a certain way, they will resemble digits and we could store information via holes in a paper 'card' !!

No more ram/storage problems! ..oh, and very organic btw !!

Hm, we probably need a family member to do the punching/reading of holes, but doable.

Whaddoyuthink - is it a killer invention or what ?

I don't think this is sustainable because it seems like a closed loop that eventually stops making money without any new inputs.

People NEED housing, they don't really need computer components.

They want consumers to have cheap low-resource systems so they are forced to use the cloud for storage and processing.

Honestly. Tankie as hell to say this, but thank fuck for China providing cheap easy alternatives to mainstream hardware

I remember doing this years ago, but the only problem I remember is they were 2 hard drives instead of 1 inside split in size to lower the cost. Idk if its different now, but if you expect 1 drive at that size that could be wrong.

Speaking of toilet paper, if they burn it can can use the heat to boil water and generate electricity. Since they use everything they can get their hands on to generate electricity it might soon be a new tp crisis.

Companies usually use HDDs because they last longer and are cheaper

They still have controllers with chips.

I will use a book shelf sized rack of RAID hubs filled with 1 GB flash drives before I buy a single fucking KB of cloud space.

I will install an ancient version of Linux on my mackie D8B soundboard and use that as my PC before I ever buy a goddamn cloud computer.

I’ve got 30tb or so made up of 4 and 10tb used drives. All I’ll buy anymore. In fact, I need to change out of of my parity drives. Hopefully used market is still somewhat affordable.

Less than a year ago 279 was a baseline price for 24tb

I got my AMD RX580 graphics card failing on me. It started to crash so frequently I had to put back my GTX1050Ti

But what if my cannibal raider gang's members need a scalable, high availability image and video storage solution for their family albums?

I am so fucking jealous of you right now. 

Usually people advise against trying to time the market. Missing the down is one thing but if you miss the way back up then that is a lot of potential profit gone. Weathering the storm is typically the better option.

Yes it does. Where do you think they store those gigantic training datasets?

Because the opposite is true. AI uses spinning rust far, far more than it does solid state storage.

My best guess is they want to use the raw materials on more profitable products. Kinda like how consumer PSUs are going up in price. The materials are being used for enterprise PSUs in the datacenter

Dude from NVIDIA: "please stop talking bad about AI. It's hurting my feelings."

Yeah… in November I was looking at the exos to get 4 or 5 on serverpartdeals, it was around 330, but I wanted to wait until January. Well last I checked they were 430 and I decided I could wait until next year ugh

Because if they can make for consumers, then there's a shit ton of investor money waiting for some tech bro to turn it into 'AI'.

The tech industry companies are playing with nigh unlimited house money, consumers can't compete.

Because AI is a dual use technology which can broker massive amounts of information to governments.

b/c they all fail as everyone is going for ai marketed cr*p

Don't buy cloud storage that's what they want you to do

If two are dead, you probably should get at least one of them replaced. I'm assuming you are running a RAID 6 with zero redundancy at this point.

Nah, fuck that

The problem with your argument is that while you can buy the lower res movie because you don't need more and if a lower res doesn't exist you can still watch the high res on your low res TV, you can't choose to buy a lower install size game or software.

When you buy those, the size it is is usually what you will have to install to use it, and if you can't buy a large enough storage to install it...

I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.

Yeah because nobody does IT innovation anymore. It's all been put toward enshitification.

the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.

Then the prices of hardware TODAY are good enough. How the fuck does it not matter that prices are skyrocketing across the board for EVERYTHING both old and new?

Get your point but most 4K encodings I see are ~10-20GB.

You realise massive capacity hard drives were never meant for the average plebian, right?

They were always aimed at people with Certain Requirements and businesses. So saying that Average Joe ain't buying a 28tb hdds isn't a gotcha, it's the norm

(Meanwhile my workplace is buying them like crazy. building a new DAS)

It's already having deeper consequences, if their purchases affect RAM and storage prices, then it means it yields results better than half a year ago.

I agree about "good enough". I felt that "good enough" moment in year 2006. In year 2009 even more. Some people remember Amiga Workbench of year 1999 stage as "good enough".

I don't think it matters which of these is closer to the equilibrium, we'll learn empirically.

But I'm feeling better that it's having a hard power redistribution from consumer sector to datacenter sector, that's not a bad thing, because most of that consumer sector was based on the bullshit you are describing. It didn't need to, but all the potent avenues of said sector's development were strangled by RIAA, "protect the children", "there are wrong people saying wrong things in the Internet" and other such pressures. And also by Steve Jobs and his idea that you don't need ergonomics or usefulness, just a sci-fi look and a brand, I think that'll take years to rectify, even though people are slowly getting tired of the "touchscreens are the future, physical buttons are fossil" narrative.

That bullshit drain means that we'll have a better, healthier consumer sector eventually. And perhaps in 10 years or so something interesting will be happening there. Life is about change and movement.

I don't know if it's just because I've grown a bit over the last 15-ish years, but a computer also seems to perform better for longer now. My 1070 I bought in 2016 (I think?) was clearly starting to lack behind with newer games after 4 years. My current 3070, which is 4 years old now, just keeps performing in new games.