Comment on Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital

Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• darkevilmac@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  You’re gonna need to sit down for me to tell you about NAND prices

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• meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ask yourself why the AI industry turned to HDDs

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  • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Same as everyone else? Because it’s a more cost-effective way of storing data?

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    • jim3692@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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      • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Is SSD really more efficient for swap?

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• tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Those prices have already been driven up.

  pcpartpicker.com/trends/…/internal-hard-drive/

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  • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yes but are they sold out for the entirety of 2026?

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    • uienia@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No, but they are prohibitively expensive. Just like hdds will be.

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