Comment on Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond

nyan@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Unless things have changed recently LLMs don’t really used slow data stores with very high capacity such as HDDs, at least not beyond the training stage.

  The prices that have been pushed up are for GPUs and DRAM (which in turn possibly feeds down to other chips done in the same kind of fab), whilst this stuff is magnetic data storage on movable disk plates, a very different tech.

  I expect these things at most will only be affected very indirectly (for example, if memory prices go up because of all the datacenters targetting AI applications, there might be fewer datacenters set up for other kinds of server side application which are more data-centric, which would impact demand for ultra high-capacity HDDs).

  No that it makes a difference to us run-of-the-mill techies as consumers - even if HDDs get cheaper, with many times more expensive GPUs and RAM we can hardly put together new systems using these things, so at best it might just get a bit cheaper to expand one’s large storage NAS (the slower kind just storing data that doesn’t get accessed often, as the other kind uses SDDs).

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  • Septimaeus@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    But is LTO next? Is AI coming for my tapes??

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Punched Paper Quantum AI is the next Revolution in Computing!

      You heard it here first.

      Invest Now!!!

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    • bhamlin@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Let AI have them, bro. Let AI have them.

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  • hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    IDK man, I bought a 10 pack of cheap thumb drives on Amazon a year ago, just big enough for giving to friends full of files or installing Linux or whatever. They were microcenter brand… Not high quality.

    The other day I used the last two, took them to work. Went to buy another pack? More than double the price I paid last week.

    Yeah yeah it’s flash, not HDDs. I don’t think it matters. Everyone is riding the “computer get more expensive” train. And once the price goes up, it doesn’t come back down.

    We’re boned.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      That’s my point - it makes sense for high demand for GPUs and RAM to leak into lower supply and hence higher price for other high density microchips that use the same process and are made in the same fabs - something which your experience seems to confirm - but HDDs are mechanical magnetic storage devices were the only microchip is a pretty basic controller.

      HDDs are about as related to GPUs and RAM as power sources.

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      • hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        That’s a fair assessment.

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