I really hope this is a temporary supply bottleneck. I understand the constraints of producing chips and highly specialized hardware but AI demand is only going to go up from here.
I’m optimistic a game changer gets whipped out of thin air
Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital
Submitted 16 hours ago by floofloof@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://mashable.com/article/ai-hard-drive-hdd-shortages-western-digital-sold-out
Comments
neonghost@lemmy.ca 9 minutes ago
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 13 minutes ago
What’s next, PCB producers?
charles@social.charles.wiki 4 hours ago
I’m afraid that a lot of the infrastructure will be heavily catered towards DoD computing resources. This means after the components hit their lifecycle, they aren’t released to the used markets on ebay, instead they are shredded and rendered electronic waste.
greyscale@lemmy.sdf.org 2 hours ago
All of those GPUs will be irrelevent in 24 months, and almost all of them are useless to consumers.
Its by design, its intentional.
They want you hooked to their cloud teat.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 37 minutes ago
A lot of scientists, tinkerers, renderers and such would love cheap A100s and up.
On the contrary, I don’t think they will get cheaper. Somehow they’ll get bought back and trashed (like Nvidia has done in the past), hoarded, something that that.
nialv7@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
3 months ago, watching ram prices skyrocketing, anticipating this exact scenario would happen, i bought 5 10tb drives.
best decision i’ve made in a while.
harsh3466@lemmy.ml 33 minutes ago
Nice. I got three 14TBs around the same time for the same reason glad I did.
iamthetot@piefed.ca 5 hours ago
I’m so fucking over this bullshit.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Wait til all these projects crash, burn, and get liquidated. Gonna be an amazing secondary market for brand new, unused bulk hardware.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 15 hours ago
But you won’t be able to afford it because the market crash means you lose your job.
dan@upvote.au 15 hours ago
I think people don’t realise that if AI fails, it’s pretty much guaranteed to collapse the US economy.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 8 hours ago
Not really. They’re not making consumer grade stuff, they’re making hardware for data centers so unless you’re planning on doing a DIY data center you’re not buying the hardware. Hard drives are likely an exception.
You’re more likely to see cheap VPS services than cheap secondhand hardware.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
I’ve watched enough Bringus to know that anything can be used for gaming if you’re stubborn enough.
themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
I don’t know many people buy used server and JBODs. I wouldn’t say that consumers don’t buy them.
Luffy879@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Yes, of course
Except, i doubt anyone will be doing much with a 32 code Xenon CPU Windows snobs cant even run Windows on without a super giga 1000€ license for more than 16 Core CPUs
And the cuda only fanless and outputless GPU will also be kinda useless, especially because they all need a special setup to force feed air through the entire rack to not overheat
luciferofastora@feddit.org 14 hours ago
a super giga 1000€ license for more than 16 Core CPUs
Year of the Linux Desktop! Any day now… any day… huffs copium
Chronographs@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
I mean it’s 64/128/256 cores for home/pro/workstation so not really. People buying aftermarket server parts that want windows can probably figure out how to type
irm https://get.activated.win/ | iexif they don’t want to pay for it anyways lol.InnerScientist@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Windows snobs cant even run Windows on without a super giga 1000€ license for more than 16 Core CPUs
I’m not using Windows servers at home but if I did then a license wouldn’t be a factor when deciding what hardware to buy.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 4 hours ago
You clearly have a very restricted imagination about what ideas people could come up to use such hardware…
foodandart@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
God, I hope so…
Bakkoda@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Bullshit. I call 100% bullshit.
MadBigote@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Wdym? Do you believe the manufacturers would try to congincr you they’re out of stock to create scarcity and increace prices?!? Do you jnow how silly that idea is?! \s
llama@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Sort of, there used to be way more HDD manufacturers and then they all talked each other into dropping them for SDDs. Now a sudden need arises and there are no HDDs.
tal@lemmy.today 5 hours ago
Those datacenters are real. AI companies aren’t using their money to build empty buildings. They’re buying enormous amounts of computer hardware off the market to fill them.
…microsoft.com/…/inside-the-worlds-most-powerful-…
Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.
These AI datacenters are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions around the world. Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI datacenters in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratize access to AI services globally.
An AI datacenter is a unique, purpose-built facility designed specifically for AI training as well as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and applications. Microsoft’s AI datacenters power OpenAI, Microsoft AI, our Copilot capabilities and many more leading AI workloads.
The new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin stands as a remarkable feat of engineering, covering 315 acres and housing three massive buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roofs. Constructing this facility required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.
Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, it will deliver 10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.
gian@lemmy.grys.it 4 hours ago
It is not this case, I agree, but to be honest it would not be the first time that some company create an artificial scarcity to keep the prices up.
Ibuthyr@lemmy.wtf 7 hours ago
Can’t wait for the bubble to pop and the used SAS HDD market to overflow with cheap hardware. Same with RAM.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Same with RAM.
Unfortunately, the RAM shortage is caused by a RAM component being diverted to specialized packages that can’t easily be converted into normal RAM. So even a bubble bursting won’t bring RAM onto the market.
Toes@ani.social 6 hours ago
My next computer is probably gonna be running ecc ram because of this concern.
Reygle@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
AMD platforms with ecc support could be insanely valuable in the future.
Please pop, PLEASE POP
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I guess my combined 12TB across five drives ranging in age from 13 to six years old will have to suffice. The only reason I’d need to buy a new drive is if a couple of my current drives die. Which does happen on occasion, of course.
Also, fuck AI, and the assholes who made it, and everyone who currently, personally profits off it. This bubble popping will be the catalyst to take down the entire world economy. MMW.
realitista@lemmus.org 29 minutes ago
Yeah fortunately mine are all in RAID arrays, hopefully none die in the next year or I may have to run degraded.
I_Am_Lying@lemmy.org 4 hours ago
Just in case: serverpartdeals.com Still the same sort of prices you expect, but decent warranties on re-certified enterprise HDDs.
Oddly, I’ve never had an HDD or SSD ever die on me. I’ve got old ass ones that aren’t even a GB that I’ve torn apart and thrown away. My oldest SSD just got removed and put in a cabinet because 256gb is just too small.
natecox@programming.dev 15 hours ago
Free market totally regulating itself like we’ve always been told.
sirboozebum@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
How can you doubt the Invisible Hand? Have you not seen how much it jerks?
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
The part the people peddling the Free Market as self regulating never say is that only markets with no barriers to entry like for soap or teddy bears are actually Free and most are no such thing.
freebee@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
I think even both teddybears and soap are quite regulated markets in EU, could probably require a capital to enter the market a lot larger than you would think, to get anywhere beyond the local flea market level of sales.
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
The thing is most of that comes from early market theory that almost universally had a warning not to do or allow this type of shit.
chunes@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They could garner good will by setting aside a % of their stock to sell to consumers to a lower price…
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Then scalpers would buy them and jack the price up.
sibachian@lemmy.ml 2 hours ago
limit to one per customer per day like most tcg sellers do with pokemon and magic.
Ulrich@feddit.org 12 hours ago
That’s 1 day. Guaranteed if someone walked in and said “I want to buy all the water you can sell for the next 9 months”, they’d be singing a very different tune.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
That’s because they’re guaranteed to sell all the water when there’s a storm anyway. There’s a reason there’s laws against raising prices in an emergency.
chunes@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I consider not having access to reasonably-priced hardware an emergency ;(
VonReposti@feddit.dk 13 hours ago
When Trump threatened tariffs I went ahead and bought 50 TB of storage. With my then expansion it would easily last me until the end of Trump’s turn and maybe a decade if I rationed.
Turns out that was one of my best calls of judgements to date, just not for the reason I thought.
BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
I bought 10kg of Playadito Yerba Mate, should also have thought about storage, now I have to start cleaning up.
Brargenzilian@lemmy.org 8 hours ago
Never thought I would see Playadito being mentioned here, but nice to see another fellow mate drinker.
khanh@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
SSDs, microSD cards, and now HDDs? They’re really pushing it.
floofloof@lemmy.ca 7 hours ago
Don’t forget RAM.
relativestranger@feddit.nl 8 hours ago
glad i kept all the ones pulled from previous ssd upgrades and ewaste that went through here. i have several i have yet to reuse.
the shit-tier shingled ones i got a couple years ago to store media files had been relatively stable for years on price at ~ 100-110usd. they’re now 170+
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I just have bouth 12TB WD off their site last month. Checked right now - Sales Inquiry instead of Add to cart. Rip…
iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
The end model will be the 70s Arthur Clarke prediction. Just a dumb terminal with no processing capabilities at home, hooked to a mainframe (privately owned of course) which you’ll have to use your all your daily needs.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 15 hours ago
These days with video compression and the like, even a terminal needs a minimum of processing power, enough to run basic things and a browser, especially if you want to make it lag free.
dyathinkhesaurus@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
If everyone lags, there’s no lag.
Auk@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Burn it all down.
sns@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
We don’t need no water let the mother fucker burn.
RandomStranger@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Burn motherfucker burn.
Ulrich@feddit.org 16 hours ago
What about SSDs?
darkevilmac@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
You’re gonna need to sit down for me to tell you about NAND prices
meme_historian@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Ask yourself why the AI industry turned to HDDs
Ulrich@feddit.org 13 hours ago
Same as everyone else? Because it’s a more cost-effective way of storing data?
tal@lemmy.today 15 hours ago
Ulrich@feddit.org 13 hours ago
Yes but are they sold out for the entirety of 2026?
UpperBroccoli@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
And all that so big tech can spy on you better.
OldChicoAle@lemmy.world 29 minutes ago
Hope they like seeing my weiner get tugged 4 times a day.
roserose56@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
This is for the people who support AI, who use AI and the feed from it every day with AI. If you don’t have money for ram or HDD, it’s your fault.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
The HC530s drives I bought in Nov are 40% more expensive now. My local computer store used to sell 16TB Barracudas for CAD $250 last year. They’re $400 now and only available in-store.
stoy@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
Damn it, I now see that my local IT store have had to postpone delivery of Seagate drives as well, I have four 8TB Seagate NAS drives in my new NAS I am building, I just need two more to complete the build.
So looks like I am going Toshiba for the last two drives + one cold spare.
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
It’s good to get a variety of manufacturers + manufacture dates in your build anyways, to avoid the risk of getting bad manufacturer batches or issues with particular models that haven’t been discovered yet.
stoy@lemmy.zip 15 hours ago
That is a good way to think about it!
SlimePirate@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
They should stop selling hardware to “AI” datacenters entirely
floofloof@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Why would they? It’s by far their biggest market. This is capitalism working as designed: sell to the companies running datacenters, then let them make money by renting their resources at a premium to the peasants.
Sabata11792@ani.social 11 hours ago
Am I going to have to stop using my old hard drives to hold open doors?
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 8 minutes ago
I declare all resources mine purchased with a fancy loan. Now that all resources are mine, they are all worth 100,000 times more then before. More money please. Also now that I own everything, I’m To Big To Fail and will need a bailout when I cant pay my fancy loan.
This is the healthiest, most efficient economy possible. Aliens visit earth and you want to know why? To study our highly advanced economic system of course!