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HDD prices spike as AI infrastructure and China's PC push collide — hard drives record biggest price increase in eight quarters, suppliers warn pressure will continue

⁨364⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨throws_lemy@lemmy.nz⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hdd-prices-spike-as-ai-infrastructure-and-chinas-pc-push-collide-hard-drives-record-biggest-price-increase-in-eight-quarters-suppliers-warn-pressure-will-continue

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Comments

Sort:hotnewtop
  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Dude.

    Fuck ALL of this.

    God fucking damnit seriously.

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  • AllHailTheSheep@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    my HDD with 80k power on hours is gonna have to keep kicking for now I guess

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  • Hamknight@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m just gonna say, check out shucks.top, just got two 14tb drives for 160 each.

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    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Are they used HDDs? Nothing worse than buying something that’s on the brink of dying.

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      • Hamknight@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Nope! They’re brand new shuckable (you can take our the hdd) external drives. I’ve have 10 14tb drives in my bad that all came from this. And if you keep the enclosures, you can still warrenty them.

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    • Diurnambule@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Thanks I didn’t think of doing that. I have sole hard drove to replace the difference on price is 50% for some huge sdd. I found this link, is it hood info or ai slop ? quickharddrive.com/…/653/

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      • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’ve trusted this site for a long time. shucks.top

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      • Hamknight@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        That’s def Ai, but it seems well curated and the info looks pretty reliable. I go for the western digital drives myself, they seem to have the best reliability. To pop them open it’s just plastic clips, and once you get the corners to pop you can usually pull the rest by hand.

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  • titanicx@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Dude that steam machine going to end up costing $5,000 for a $500 pc.

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  • network_switch@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As others, my basic home lab NAS plans are grounding to a stop because of worsening prices. Next up, phones are going to be even more expensive. Video game console price increases again

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  • AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is this like the last wave before the entire thing collapses or what?

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  • voytrekk@sopuli.xyz ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The bubble cannot burst fast enough. I’m tired of these higher hardware costs because of a feature that nobody wants.

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    • frunch@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      My fear is that this is only going to become the new pricing floor. Someone suggested that these companies are going to systematically scoop up nearly all remaining tech in an attempt to sell cloud computing etc as the only option for the average consumer (due to lack of affordable or perhaps even available tech)…

      I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they don’t want us having any access to our own computers etc because they can only control so much of what we can do with them.

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      • anomnom@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I think digital fascism is a likely motivator at this point. The ceos have all been hanging out with the political fascists, so there’s not much reason to think otherwise.

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      • undeffeined@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I’ve also seen this perspective online and I really hope it’s just a theory and not reality.

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    • Zeoic@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s not really something that no one wants though… Lemmy is loudly against it, but in real life we have tons of people actually asking for it all the time. Hell at work they had to setup a company AI provider account because people using their own subscriptions was happening too much.

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      • Prove_your_argument@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        IT departments are under a lot of pressure by business leadership to have AI offerings. Most businesses are asking to implement a buzzword, not solve any kind of business challenge.

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  • 4am@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It sounds conspiratorial to say it seems like they are trying to crash the consumer market so that computing will be entirely dependent on their services, but I mean…

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    • phx@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I was thinking on that yesterday.Mass local storage affordable? No no no, better to drive those prices way up so that we can sell you “cloud” services instead.

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    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think that seems obvious.

      They want to make their services cheaper for them to run, and they want to sell them for more money, while buying up hardware so nobody else can compete with them or not depend on them.

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    • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s because the average USA citizen is economically irrelevant. The money is in the to 10% and the big corpos, especially AI with all the money sloshing around there. The 90% consumer market doesn’t matter as much these days.

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      • cecilkorik@lemmy.ca ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.

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    • paultimate14@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

      That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

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    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.

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  • Nastybutler@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Guess I waited a hair too long to pull the trigger on a NAS setup

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    • GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      My thoughts exactly, but it’s only going to get worse :/

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    • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I needed to buy another 20TB drive. I paid 100$ more for THE SAME MODEL i bought two years ago.

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  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    All of this just to automate the process of enslaving the world.

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    • AreaKode@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Due to “human rights” laws, we have to pay the slaves these days!

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      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.

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  • villainy@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m saving up now to afford the lease on a nice certified pre-owned Dell in a couple years. My buddy Dave works over at the dealership so I should be able to lock in a good rate. And hey, with their super lease-to-own options maybe I’ll be able to keep it at the end! That’d be nice you know… something to hand down to the kids when they’re old enough for their computing license. Fingers crossed! 🤞

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    • einlander@lemmy.world ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      We’re going backwards in time. Computers use to cost multi thousand dollars and you needed a loan to buy one.

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      • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.

        We’ve had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.

        Now it’s supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don’t think it’ll end.

        A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn’t even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we’ll see improvement.

        OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components’ prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That’s good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.

        I’ve read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That’s a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).

        So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing “content” from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I’d want. Including production, standards and everything.

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    • ivanafterall@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I wish all of our infrastructure weren’t built around needing computers. I’m lucky my small community is typewriter-friendly, so I can get most of my daily tasks done without ever getting behind the wheel of a mouse.

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  • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    4% is hardly a spike in the scheme of things. That’s just inflation when things aren’t really coming down in price any more.

    I bought a drive a year or so ago and was surprised how expensive it was. At some point the price just stopped dropping. Presumably there’s a limit on how cheap you can make a spinning rust drive before it just doesn’t work any more.

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    • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Lol, only 4%. Ram more than doubled.

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  • 9point6@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Optical drives next I guess lol

    What’s even going on anymore

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    • ArfArfWoof@feddit.org ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I read news of SATA SSDs spiking in price just a few hours ago. Gonna go to sleep now, expecting a spike in floppy disk prices when I wake up and punch cards tomorrow evening.

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      • not_that_guy05@lemmy.world ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Didn’t Samsung say that they weren’t making consumer Sata ssds anymore? Jfc we really are going to the whole “you own nothing”.

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    • Empricorn@feddit.nl ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Enshittification, but on a massive scale.

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  • fox2263@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I was waiting for them to come down in order to get another for my NAS. Now they’re gonna go up again instead. Fuck me

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This isn’t a huge increase. It’s not on the order of what just happened with RAM.

      According to a report from Digitimes Asia (quoting Nikkei), HDD contract prices jumped roughly 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025.

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  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Remember when being able to buy a PC was semi-affordable? That was nice. Now it’s transitioning into a luxury product.

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    • dustyData@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      For the vast part of the world, that is not the us or the EU, a Pc, specially a very powerful one like for gaming, has always been an expensive luxury item. You’re just joining the club late.

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      • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        You guys are turbo fucked now though. I guess I’ll keep my video game consoles going because at least they will always be able to play games; especially all my older ones

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’ve been putting off building a new pc. More and more it looks like my 10 year old machine has got a few more years left in it.

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    • tyrant@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I just built an am4 machine from mostly old parts I had kicking around. Was happy I went a little to crazy a few years ago. No way I’d of been able to do it with prices now

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      • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, my trick is to save up and try to buy the 2nd best components as much as possible. The very best will always have a shiny new thing tax attached to them, but 2nd best is where the real value comes in. Granted I’m not building gaming pcs, so this isn’t too unreasonable. The current market won’t let me get close to what I’d actually like though.

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  • Grass@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    fuck I need to replace a drive in my nas soon but I’m already broke

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  • Baguette@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How tf are hdds going up in price

    Did the data centers somehow buy up all the sdds and decided nah we need more, lets buy up all the hdds too

    Like ???

    At this rate i gotta start grabbing my old drives to reuse because apparently 2010 equipment is back on the plate or smth

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    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s all about the Pentiums!

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  • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    First SSDs and now HDDs too?

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    • Zorque@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Well if you can’t get SSDs, what are you going to use for storage? I doubt tape drives are best as daily drivers.

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      • fleton@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        My old pack of floppy drives is going to make me rich!

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  • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Guess im keeping add my dvds and vhs tapes then

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  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    this is going to be great

    prepare yourselves, nerds! buy your woodworking and farming tools now before those go up too!

    if we all just turn off from the internet and technology in general, AI won’t have content to steal from or a market to sell it to.

    this is the way.

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  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It seems like I’ll soon have to use my DVD burner yet again. Now only if I found one for my ThinkPad, as it’s one of the last models that still had an option for it.

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  • Wooki@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Economic policies will start shifting to inflation reducing by raising interest rates. This is purely inflationary in all economies and it’s hilariously going to tank stock trading.

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  • Wigglesworth@retrolemmy.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hosting a federated site on calculators and old gaming consoles to become trendy

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