Yeah right, of they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing in in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
themurphy@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?
Why HDDs?
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 days ago
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 days ago
My understanding is the large AI companies sign purchase agreements with the manufacturers for X amount of drives. The manufacturers then take whatever chips/platters and build those drives. The AI companies have signed such large agreements that all the chips and layers are going to whatever drives they’re asking for and none left to make consumer drives.
nforminvasion@lemmy.world 2 days ago
They’re replacing us. Until now, corporations have obviously marketed to the working class, even the poorest of us. And they put in that effort, but now they’re moving past us bottom 90% of consumers and focusing on the top 10% and of course the ultra rich specifically. The top 10% of consumers already accounted for 55% of all buying power in Feb 2025, before tariffs, before the unnamed recession we’re in now, before the shutdown and mass firings.
So now you can imagine what that number is at, and you can see their thought process. It’s just not worth bothering to market and sell to us commoners.
Now, I think they’re stupid and I think they’re way too confident in something like the AI bubble, which will pop eventually. That being said, most new purchases (cars, clothes, electronics, ect…) are by the top 10%. They are gunning for our buying power and they are gunning for our labor power with AI. If they succeed, we will lose our two biggest bargaining chips. The ultra rich know this, and they hate that we have had any say over the economy.
If we’re gonna do this general strike, we gotta do it soon, because they are actively working to make action like that impossible.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 2 days ago
They are working an infinite money glitch:
What if we were our own customers? Then we could charge whatever we wanted and just use the money from our dumb investors, and since we are also the producers we make a ton of money on the sales!
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 2 days ago
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
PixxlMan@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The tools which make 1 tb HDDs also make bigger ones.
Denvil@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
I work at a data center, and there are indeed big arrays of 1 tb sata HDDs. Although this isn’t for AI, our main clients are local companies and healthcare
Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Storage capacity for datacenters and other data-hungry business operations (think YouTube scale).
Current alternatives don’t reach the same capacity for 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.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The data used to create that image of the black hole had a transfer speed of 14GB/s because ~700TB of it was captured in Antarctica and spent 14 hours traveling by plane
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.
WereCat@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
I’ve got 8TB Seagate Exos 7E10 8TB for 182€ in May now it’s almost 260€.
We’re fucked…
73ms@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
if you are looking this from the US that is not necessarily the only thing that could be driving prices up though. You’ve got tariffs and a much weaker dollar than it used to be right now…
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.
WereCat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
US prices are just EU prices + sales tax now