Submitted 3 weeks ago by vegeta@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/20/ai_blamed_again_as_hard_drives_sell_out/?td=rt-3a
so much wrong with this title.
Fuck AI
It’s nice how AI datacenters step by step swallow virtually all available hardware resources to provide digital services to users who won’t be able to use those services due to the lack of available hardware.
Hardware will be available, silly. ^†^
You will have the “freedom” ^†^ to choose from the hardware vendor* you want. Like always!^‡‡^
^† For $49.95 per month.^
^ Terms and conditions and government social score apply. ^
^‡‡ Authorized and approved by the department of national security and intelligence gathering agencies and the billionaire technofascist bros club ^
I doubt offering AI services to the public is their goal.
that’s okay they will replace users with AI. it’s going to be AI all the way down
You can use them fine. In fact, you’ll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.
The one I just bought came with 3 of the fucking things installed on it.
I get paid on the 27th, I need two more 8TB drives to complete my NAS, my local retailer had 50+ in stock earlier this week, and now the drives are no longer even listed.
Fuck sake…
I bought 2 8TB drives last week and had to check if they were still in stock at the same retailer and they are, but the price had gone up with 23%…
I do see that another retailer has drives in stock, but at about 40-50% more than I paid back in October
I just bought a few WD drives direct, but their web site has a problem with validating virtual credit card numbers. I’m the few days it took to resolve it the price went up. Fortunately since I had the support ticket I was able to get refunded the difference.
Go Toshiba. If American companies got us into this mess in the first place, fuck American companies!
I will if I can, as it stands I have four 8TB seagate drives, enough for my actual storage need, but I want to have two parity drives for extra protection.
I am planning on running ZFS with Zraid2, the drives are the final piece of the puzzle to at least get it working.
When I planned the build, I planned to get another controller card and run two SSDs as well, one for cache (I can add that later), and one for VM/App storage, I also planned on getting an Intel GPU for transcoding video, and a 10Gig NIC, mainly just to say I have it, as my network isn’t more than normal gigabit.
It is getting more important to complete the build as I need to move my media from single, non raided hard drives in my computer to a well raided server that I can configure for bitrot protection.
I recently checked on the price of the used 12TB server drive I bought a couple years ago. It was 80 then. It’s 260 now. Same seller.
Good idea. I just looked at a drive I bought six months ago and it’s up 40% or so. Wish I’d have got two now.
Three months ago I put two 20TB hard drives in my cart for $350 each. This week I had to pull the trigger on them and they were $420 each
Bought a 20 TB external for ~$270 a few months ago. It’s now $400:
1TB SSD I bought at the end of 2024 for $47 is $142 now
12TB HDDs were $104 a piece at the same time and are now $300 each.
I’m guessing you got similar drives to the ones I got. I paid ~$72 each (4x 12TB), and now the same HGST DC drives from the same seller are $220. Just glad I got them when I did, even though now I have to continually prune the data so it all fits within this forever limit.
I will absolutely remember the companies that are saying “fuck the consumer” when I go to purchase anything going forward.
Honestly which companies does that leave?
Great point.
I think it has to be considered by degree. Some companies, like Micron, are outright discontinuing their consumer brands while others are ‘just’ deprioritizing consumers to chase the AI bandwagon.
It’s those companies’ prerogative to chase profits, but I’ll never buy another Micron product again if they ever decide to come crawling back.
On the upside, homelabs are going to have a glut of high capacity, barely used server hard drives to choose from then this AI/data centre bubble eventually bursts?
If it bursts, that is. I have a fear that people behind AI have grown so savvy of the bubbles, that they have a complicated plan to avoid it, and artificially uphold it with the help of bribed/blackmailed politicians.
Trading is done by algorithms and bots now. There’s no panic selling anymore because the human factor is gone.
I really think it’s impossible to have a crashes anymore.
As every industry before them did.
Blamed?
More like responsible. Alongside big tech
Buy used
Wild that people were down voting you. Hard drives can last decades and are replaced from enterprise servers long before they’re close to failing.
Especially with lowered use compared to a server, you won’t see much functional difference between brand new consumer grade and used server grade.
Pretty sure caches and everything are better on used server grade still anyways.
For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise…
Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.
I’m glad I bought an 8 TB HDD about a year ago as an investment, it’s now $50 more expensive a year later. I don’t plan on ever filling it up, but it’s been helpful, and good insurance to have if I ever create a project that requires that space.
So with all the news on hardware shortages…someone is building skynet…and we just don’t know about it.
Less skynet and more a surveillance state thats gonna put England and even CCP to shame.
They need the hard drives because they’re storing everything about us. Every time we drive by a camera, gps paths of our cell phones constant travel, every bank transaction including small purchases, every social media comment, page we view from WiFi or cellphone, all our connections to everyone else, tags for various groups.
Not even just the people we know we know, they’ll know who’s usually next to us in traffic on commutes and when, who makes our sandwich from the deli we go to every other Tuesday, what cops would be most likely to respond to a call to our house at a certain time…
Like, “skynet” is useful because everyone knows the term.
The real danger is what humans will do with access to that much information on everyone, and what a normal human would do to/for a stranger to protect all their darkest secrets.
Imagine if tech was 20 years ahead right now with trump in office, do you think someone like him would hesitate to start wide scale blackmail?
You think they’re above telling a couple thousand people in highly targeted districts that they had to vote a certain a way or else?
It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.
It’s extremely unhealthy for a free society, to have too much power imbalance between the ruling classes and the people.
It’s not the AI we need to be scared of, it’s the data.
That said, imagine an actual AGI (ASI) AI gets developed and (of course) escapes to the internet because the idiots who built it gave it unrestricted internet access.
If such an AI wanted to take control of the world in order to further whatever goals it has, all this collected information will be an incredible treasure trove for it. Like you said, many people can be manipulated an controlled with threats of blackmail. The few who can’t can then be more directly threatened by those acting under blackmail threats.
What do you think all those data centers are for?
I bought a 22tb hdd from serverpartdeals in late December of 2025. Its now $100 more expensive, I’m glad I read the tea leaves in time but this sucks.
I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)
Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They’re now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.
28 TB is now sold out in serverpartsdeals, guess we have to wait till the bubbles pops.
This framing is journalistic malpractice. Using the term blamed implies room for doubt where there is none, it’s a clear and provable driver of this issue. We desperately need public funding for journalism, as long as outlets rely on private investment to function there will always be this kind of manipulation and bias infused into news media.
Funny thing, we had that back before the 80’s. Yeah Republicans killed it. and now we’re in the shit show you see all around.
Huh, I wonder why they would do that… So Weird ™. Surely unrelated to the tRump republicans axeing PBS funding in this current term…
Welp, I guess I’m all out of money for new tech. Time to travel or find a new hobby.
These sound like great ideas. Additionally, I find that making the most of the hardware I already have can be really satisfying, too.
This feels like you’re about to try and sell me on linux.
let’s hope it comes crashing down in their face soon enough
Apparently there is a huge demand for storage, both RAM and disk. Oh, and GPUs… So what happens when large number of people are looking to buy stuff? In time, I think there is a silver lining here…
Demand went up but supply hasn’t adjusted, and maybe won’t, to meet it. I’d imagine the parts manufacturers would be worried about the bubble bursting as much as we are cheering it on.
I don’t mean existing manufacturers necessarily. Unfortunately there are no certainties, but I’d say give it some time. These chips are (or at the very least becoming) strategic commodities, so the greater the squeeze the more appealing the business case will be. Besides, both the US and EU want to grow their chip manufacturing capacity and it’s not like there is no investment money available. So at some point production capacity will grow.
The the demand stays elastic and the supply doesn’t then you can just scale the pricing as much as you want. Saying you’re sold out for the year is literally telling everyone in advance the prices will continue to be manipulated .
I was able to update 2 of 3 devices early last year, but couldn’t upgrade my old custom build. I did that due to possible tariffs; didn’t even think about this “AI” BS. Thought may as well just buy a custom build now. Wanted to wait another year, but I won’t be upset no matter what happens with prices if I get it now. I’m not sure my old girl can outlive the return of easily available PC parts. At least I also bought some extra storage over a year ago.
those who promote ai usage and even pay for it ought to be blamed too.
While I can see some benefits in using llm for some things, way things currently are the negatives way outweigh the positives. Using it should be something to be ashamed about so this shit collapses sooner and maybe we can get some peace. Maybe once all the commotion dies down llm could become useful tool, but if its tied to destruction of our way of life (planet dying, economic disruption, no components for regular people) then it just has to go.
Alternative is we just submit and hope our owners dont abuse us too much.
This is how they kill home computing and force everyone to bezos net with your drumpf Gold terminal ($390/month with KKK membership)
Fuck ALL these peoole.
I’ve two countem two 500gb HDD by WD, starting price is 2500$. And I’ll throw in external cases for 100$ (the cables are blue meaning usb 3.0 a which are 250$)
Next up, torches and pitchforks will ve sold out. And AI won’t exist.
I’m highly suspect this happens at the same time that Microsoft is demanding you upgrade your PCs to run their shitty software. and discontinuing Windows 10
They need to roll that back.
They want us to rent or compute from the clouds so they can watch each and everything we do.
The worst part is that we don’t something, and by saying something, I mean boycott them.
Look what they are doing to us, just to build AI data centers.
Worst part, is that there is no progress of AI. It is used only for capitalist profits by companies(support chat bots, girlfriend AI and goes on).\
The worst part is that we don’t something, and by saying something, I mean boycott them.
Boycott is under way. In my bubble, people are ditching American goods and services left and right, including Windows. The combination of “Murica first” (fascist edition) and big tech overreach has prompted people to make good use of their middle fingers.
shit dude I’ll move my storage to S3 and retire on what I can get from my 16tb array and 20tb backup.
no wonder they need so much power/rare earths. ssds next
SSDs were first, actually, with HDDs now following suit.
Theres a reason we have 256TB SSDs. Consumers dont really need them and they are of limited value vor conventional Datacentres.
realitista@lemmus.org 3 weeks ago
The irony is as they bid up the price of all the hardware, they are probably making their AI platforms more likely to fail due to being more expensive than their value.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
We can only hope that their businesses crash hard before any of these deals come to fruition and then when the hardware has nowhere to go we can all “buy the dip” so to speak.
To be clear, I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware, but hopefully it all crashing down will help get more people into self-hosting and working on community resources and networks instead of having everything live in the cloud.
14th_cylon@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
it actually won’t be, at least not for the hard drives. the prevailing strategy these days is just use the cheapest possible disks and deal with the failures on the software level. those disks will ultimately fail anyway and the increased price for some super-duper enterprise reliability server disk is not really worth it.
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I’m currently hosting everything on old desktop PCs and SBCs but fuck it, I’ll swipe some closeout hardware and upgrade to a proper server rack.
TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
the dow is 50k and 37% of the DOW is made up of those seven
freaking financial centipede
coyootje@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I can’t wait for it to crash and burn, this bubble is getting so ridiculous.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
These companies are publicly traded…
The people who run/own the AI companies would have been complete idiots to not invest in the hardware companies they were going to make these purchases from before making those purchases.
But 100 million in Seagate stock, then announce you just signed a contract buying up supply.
Your company may overpay, but you personally just made a shit ton of money. Which is the why you want your company to succeed
As a bonus, the news that you’re overpaying to buy up all the hard drives, doesn’t hurt your company it helps it.
There’s no way to monetize it anyways, the product is the stock price. And this move makes the company seem confident, which raises stock price.
That’s not even getting into the long term problem that even if AI fails, were seeing a huge migration in computing power from individuals to private corporations. That’s a big deal even if AI dies tomorrow. And they have a lot of motivation to never let us get it back.
realitista@lemmus.org 3 weeks ago
This is illegal but I’m sure it happens all the time.