Note: Posted by the same media outlet that reported last week about the 9700X3D with zero fact checking
Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage — delays forcing rapid transition to QLC SSDs
Submitted 23 hours ago by TheImpressiveX@lemmy.today to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
carrylex@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
roofuskit@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Remember a year or so ago when they all spun down production so they could charge more money for drives? I do.
yesman@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
So, if the AI bubble pops, it’ll be a great time to build a PC
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Like there won’t be some other hype to immediately take it’s place. Just like Bitcoin GPU prices never collapsed because it went right into AI hype.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 20 hours ago
Tbf Bitcoin didn’t fuck with the GPU market, that was more etherium’s doing
BlastboomStrice@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
Im seeing a pattern here (capitalism)
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
AI messed up GPU prices even before AI was really a thing. When everyone was caught up in the Bitcoin hype, Nvidia already focused completely on AI instead of banking on the crypto hype, neglecting consumer GPUs. And we still feel that today.
sakuraba@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
I’ll pray for this outcome, I need something that can actually run Unreal(requirements) Engine 5 games
Pistcow@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
*Home server farm.
Wispy2891@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
There are a lot of “refurbished” drives from when the Chia bubble popped (a useless shitcoin that wasted HDD space with garbage data as a proof of cryptographic work)
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Data storage devices are the last items you wanna buy second hand though. A drive failing could mean much more than just having to buy a new one.
someacnt@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
Wish I could confidently say that it is going to pop soon, but I am not sure the current rebound is the bull trap. Maybe the correction was just a small blip in a huge bubble…
shalafi@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
When the AI bubble pops we’ll all be too broke to buy any PC anything.
The Buffett Index, America’s total stock valuation vs. GDP, is at 200%. It was around 130% in 1929, 2000 and 2007. Guess what? Chicken butts. (is what we’ll all be eating)
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I thought similar during the GPU crypto mining phase. There’s always something blocking cheap PCs.
SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world 23 hours ago
THIS is what I’m looking forward to. I’m guessing it’ll start sometime next year, so shortly after Christmas '26 will be the optimal time -at least that’s my long-term plan.
probable_possum@leminal.space 11 hours ago
Nope. China vs. Taiwan at the horizon. They really want that island back. It won’t be good for world peace and really bad for last gen litho chips.
China vs. Europe and China vs. US are topics, too. Hopefully limited to economic pressure.
There’s always the second hand market…
Natanael@infosec.pub 10 hours ago
back
The current mainland China gov never had any real claims to it. The argument they use is the same as for why they believe they have the right to enforce Chinese law on Chinese people abroad, including having their own secret police in other countries, etc, they simply don’t accept being anything less than the sole authority and sole representative for everybody they consider to belong to any ethnicity which is “theirs”. The claims on the island doesn’t really have much to do with the island, but that it’s populated with people they consider theirs.
ButteryMonkey@piefed.social 20 hours ago
Be a great time to set up RAID storage systems mmmmmmm I cannot waaaaait to have something resembling a backup.
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Required message that “raid is not a backup [solution]”, it’s an uptime and recovery system.
My primary server uses raid along with snapshots, full local backups, and off-site backups for critical data to two different cloud providers on different continents.
My second server backups images to the primary. My vps also backups to the primary. Both get the raid and snapshot treatment, and local, but not cloud. Gaming servers, boinc, and home assistant aren’t ‘critical’ :p
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
AI crap. Infesting everything. Search of all kinds, photo management, telephone menus, who knows what else. And it does none of it well.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
I don’t have issues with local AIs, for things like searching your local immich instance, or controlling your local Home Assistant devices. That photo of a bird you took 3’ish years ago? Yeah, you can find it in like three seconds with a local AI search. Want to turn the lights on with a voice request? AI is one of the easiest ways for a layman to handle the language processing side of things. All of that is a drop in the ocean.
But corporations have been trying to cram it into everything, even when it’s not a good fit for what they want to do. And so far, their solution to making it fit hasn’t been to rethink their usage and consider whether or not it will actually improve a product. Instead, their approach has simply been to build more and bigger data centers, to throw increasing amounts of processing power at the problem.
The technology itself isn’t inherently harmful on the small scale. But it has followed the same pattern as climate change. Individual consumers are blamed for climate change, and are consistently urged to change their consumption habits… When it’s actually a handful of corporations producing the vast majority of greenhouse emissions. Even if every single person drastically changed their emission habits, it would barely make a dent in the overall production. It was all because of massive astroturfed PR campaigns to shift the blame away from those companies and onto individuals. And we’ve seen that same thing happen with AI, where individual users have been blamed for using AI, instead of the massive corporations.
WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
Think of all the cheap hardware being resold when the AI bubble pops.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
There wasn’t as big of a price drop as I thought there would be when the crypto mining switched to ASIC from GPUs. Don’t know of all that hardware just got dumped or is sitting in a rack rotting somewhere. Hope that we get cheaper prices when the bubble pops, this artificial scarcity sucks.
Tja@programming.dev 7 hours ago
Immich does photo management pretty well.
tomatolung@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I think your sentiment and the back end requirements of AI is a big downfall of it, as while your sentiment has validity in many public facing deployments of it there are some things it is actually succeeding at. I speak from experience having used it for several specific use cases which it excels at, but you and others probably don’t have time nor care that this is true. And again marketing idiots out weight the deliberate approach that engineers and others might want, much less the economy might need.
87Six@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
cases which it excels at
Uhuh
Like me colleagues often come to me saying they fixed it with Cursor and when I check the UI where the bug was, the page doesn’t even load at all now.
I just had someone tell me they did something with AI and when I checked they didn’t even get right the very basic thing of coding around the right controller names. The fucking names were wrong. They didn’t even check the feature, they just shipped, called it fixed, and told me Cursor figured it out really quickly.
I’m tired of this.
JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Preaching down to folks who already have a good reason to hate your product is a good way to join that pile
tomatolung@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I posted this as a perspective on AI that is not given by AI, nor by someone who believes it will stay this way, but nor am I promoting it. I believe it’s more nuanced that just being crap, although it is taking over many things in life. I have used it, I know how to use it for good (keeping it private, local, and to help teach reasoning as well as do the thing that we need done (like dishes, bills, and other bullshit). I’m fully aware it’s a bubble (14 billion to 1.4 trillion for OpenAI alone), dislike it and hate the energy waste. You all just seem to want to keep up the ignorant web user stereotype.
Have fun down voting something you don’t really understand.
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Ouch, I picked the wrong time to finally upgrade from my 12 year old laptop and Windows 7?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 51 minutes ago
yeah win7 is better than any later winproduct
HertzDentalBar@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
Just install Linux on it. My laptop is from 2011 and I’ve got bazzite on it and it’s been great. That should atleast get you through the bubble
HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Yeah but it’s a hardware issue that’s beyond my caring to try and troubleshoot. Random blue screens, memtest86 shows an error always at the same address no matter which sodimms I put or swap them around. I guess it runs until software enters that address range and blam! I think it might be power supply related at the board level, not the power brick. I don’t feel like changing capacitors at random, for all I know there might be voltage out of spec because a resistor value drifted.
carrylex@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
And what exactly has that to do with HHDs?
Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
OP is upgrading FROM 12 yr old hardware during a time where hardware prices prices are rising due to a shortage of some components because AI data centers are demanding them.
InFerNo@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
Depends, is your choice of OS windows 10?
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
If so, you are fucked.
SW42@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Oh for fucks sake… I wanted to expand my NAS… Crypto was (is still responsible) for the shit state of the GPU Market and now it’s the next scam.
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Just got 12TB IronWolf last week for an average price if 260euro. Delivery is long but other than that, price is average.
Checked just right now - average 310euro for the same HDD. From the place I picked mine - 293. SCORE!
Thinking about this for a minute - that’s probably pre-Black-Friday prices. We’ll see
JGrffn@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
Imagine how I feel right now, I bought 16 used 20tb Seagate drives around September last year for $200 each, from Amazon, and finally built my dream NAS after a decade of waiting and planning. I don’t understand how I got so lucky but I did. They’re all working just fine, and I somehow avoided having to wait another decade to finally build my NAS due to random capitalism gold rush bullshit. Praise be.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
i just bought an 8tb drive a couple weeks ago with zero issue
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
TL;DR
QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.
In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).
–
Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.
Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide which digital value it that analog value actual corresponds to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain margin of the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.
(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal)
So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signall or cell damage from operating, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.
All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than what was written).
Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what’s stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value for what is stored there) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that’s mainly read only that in systems with fewer levels or lower overt-time signal decay, the endurance problem is much worse because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC from data that frequently written (yeah, wear-leveling spreads the effect over all cells thus giving overall endurance is higher, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC).
axum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
First outrageous DDR5 RAM prices now ssd’s.
Welp. Won’t be upgrading my pc for the next few years I see
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
and hard drives too, right?
ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 7 hours ago
DDR4 too, as they phase it out. I bought 2x32GB of DDR4 for my older system 8 months ago for $80. Now a deal for 32GB is $90-100.
black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you
Kissaki@feddit.org 8 hours ago
But I bought only once HDD 😞
apftwb@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
RAID5, don’t fail me now!
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 11 hours ago
As a PSA: depending on your needs (bcs I see a lot of simple homelabs RAIDing), consider second server or even second location simple snapshot backup vs same-machine duplication.
Like, which would you want to set up first depending on your specific risks profile.The later is like like a proper backup, the former more of a low-downtime strat (that most smol homelabs can do without - “just wait a day, mom”)
Eg as the most basic example - instead of local duplication you could have a small PC (even like some old Pi), big HDD, and rsync once a day.
(Ofc, with duplicated serves, finances permitting, you can also provide backup services which helps that downtime issue. And by finances I mean the rest of your server group stuff, which in my cases is mostly HDD cost anyways.)
apftwb@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Got it!*
*puts a Timeshift partition on the same RAID array
PissingIntoTheWind@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
This collapse when we only need 1/100 of what they are planning. Because not everyone is going to need a massive data center. Just like cars, computers and every other technology. It starts out diverse than shrinksssssssss.
Bababasti@feddit.org 14 hours ago
Just thinking about all the electronic waste this is gonna generate is making me feel all icky
regedit@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Now may not be a good time to tell you about the Windows 10 EoL that recently lapsed, then.
plyth@feddit.org 12 hours ago
Think about all the HDDs that they will sell for cheap in 5 years.
rafoix@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
What else are these data centers going to hoard?
Jobs, GPUs, water, hard drives
sefra1@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
Electricity
1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@piefed.zip 19 hours ago
Ironic Microsoft doesn’t have enough electricity to power their hogged gpus.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Land.
DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
Privacy
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours ago
Jet engines.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
Oh this must be for
trainingstolen datasolrize@lemmy.ml 23 hours ago
Ram shortage too. But most users should avoid QLC.
salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 23 hours ago
I noticed the price doubled since the last time I ordered a drive, like a year ago.
solrize@lemmy.ml 21 hours ago
I haven’t been following trends but I just looked on newegg, and HDD and SSD prices look about where they were before, or maybe a bit higher. It’s nothing like the Chia craze where every drive of any kind was snapped up by crypto miners. Or the simliar thing further back where a flood in Thailand(?) clobbered a factory so there were big shortages and price spikes. Right now you can get drives if you’re willing to pay for them. There just hasn’t been the usual downward price trend.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 18 hours ago
I’ve been waiting over a month for my MicroCenter to restock Western Digital 14-16 TB HDD to upgrade my NAS. I finally caved and ordered direct from Western Digital. It still took them 10 days to ship the order.
anguo@piefed.ca 21 hours ago
Damn, I started building a home server this summer, and I still need some HDDs for a NAS...
Reiea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Makes me glad I built my nephew a country l computer last Christmas instead of this one.
FundMECFS@anarchist.nexus 2 hours ago
Why HDD’s?
I thought LLMs ran on a fuckload of VRAM and thats pretty much it. So the GPU market was the main affected?