Ask yourself why the AI industry turned to HDDs
Comment on Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital
Ulrich@feddit.org 20 hours ago
What about SSDs?
meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Ulrich@feddit.org 18 hours ago
Same as everyone else? Because it’s a more cost-effective way of storing data?
jim3692@discuss.online 16 hours ago
No. AI workloads benefit from SSD’s high random read/write performance. Also, I guess, more people starting using SSDs for paging/swap, as RAM prices skyrocketed.
This resulted in an SSD shortage immediately after RAM starting getting expensive. Which in turn caused an HDD shortage, because people need space to store their data.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
TBH I don’t even know what they’re using the SSDs for.
Most businesses are too stupid to train their own models from scratch, and won’t use “foreign” ones so they won’t finetune them either.
On the inference side… SSDs aren’t used for much. Just storing Docker stuff/dependencies and model weights for the initial load, and that’s it. Maybe some data for bulk processing, but that’s no different than existing software. The one niche may be KV cache swapping for re-using prompt prefixes, but this is limited and being obsoleted by new attention mechanism.
So WTF do they even need SSDs and HDDs for? Honestly it feels like FOMO purchasing.
Scrollone@feddit.it 5 hours ago
Is SSD really more efficient for swap?
tal@lemmy.today 19 hours ago
Ulrich@feddit.org 18 hours ago
Yes but are they sold out for the entirety of 2026?
uienia@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
No, but they are prohibitively expensive. Just like hdds will be.
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
You’re gonna need to sit down for me to tell you about NAND prices