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…
AI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year
Submitted 5 hours 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
Comments
stoy@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
janne_fran_innsbruck@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
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%…
baronvonj@piefed.social 3 hours ago
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.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
Fuck AI
db2@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
kingofthezyx@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
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.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
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
MOARbid1@piefed.social 4 hours ago
I will absolutely remember the companies that are saying “fuck the consumer” when I go to purchase anything going forward.
orangeyouglad@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
Honestly which companies does that leave?
MOARbid1@piefed.social 2 hours ago
Great point.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Buy used
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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.
ZeDoTelhado@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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…
redbrick@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
So with all the news on hardware shortages…someone is building skynet…and we just don’t know about it.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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.
OwOarchist@pawb.social 1 hour ago
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.
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 hour ago
What do you think all those data centers are for?
rogsson@piefed.social 2 hours ago
let’s hope it comes crashing down in their face soon enough
roserose56@lemmy.zip 3 hours ago
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).\
realitista@lemmus.org 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 1 hour 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 4 hours ago
the dow is 50k and 37% of the DOW is made up of those seven
freaking financial centipede
coyootje@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I can’t wait for it to crash and burn, this bubble is getting so ridiculous.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 hours 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 hours ago
This is illegal but I’m sure it happens all the time.