💾 Western Digital
We are sold out
WTF!??
Why?
• LLM's demolished the server HDD stock.
Western Digital has run out of HDD capacity for 2026!
Disaster for consumers small professionals & even large professionals!
CEO Irving Tan has confirmed the company is running on fumes
• Purchase orders from major customers & longterm agreements are reaching well into 2K27 & even 2K28!
• Three years of desert level drought is close for consumers regarding WD HDD's
Who is buying the HDD stock?
Datacenters
• LLM companies (what a set of ^&^#$&^)
• Cloud & Hyperscale Data Centers
•• many don't even have their datacenters built
• These entities now give WD 90% of its revenue.
• Consumer drives are just 10%.
Enterprise demand is decimating supply
• LLM training
• inference logs
• scraped STOLEN web data
• backups
•• these need many Petabytes of storage
Even though GPUs get the headlines (whining gamers), HDDs are the crucial backbone of LLM boom
•• They’re still the most cost-effective way to store Peta and Exabytes of data.
Results
• Consumer HDD supplies shrink
• Enterprise long term agreements {LTA} are locking in multi-year volume + pricing
• Price pressure is already happening (I feel them already)
•• A puny 8TiB Western Digital consumer grade HDD was 108USD two years ago all they way to my country of SR / SA
•• That same 8TiB HDD is now 196 USD to my country if and WHEN I can find it
••• I now find other brands easier but due to the higher quality they naturally cost more to begin with
••• Toshiba 7 Fujitsu are a few of those brands
••• I'd be better off getting a box of 24TiB server grade HDD's
••• In bulk ammounts, these cost less per TiB & they have many more IOPs that consumer HDDs
DRAM and NAND
We are all suffering from DRAM and NAND prices seeking amazingly horrific heights
• Try to get a 64GiB to 512GiB microSD card for a normal price (feb 2K25 level)
• While you are at it do the same with 64GiB to 256GiB USB sticks
• You won't find them (needles in haystacks aer a snap to find in comparison)
•• Large microSD cards are for now fairly normally priced (20% more) but I need small ones for my SBC computer(s) which need many OS distro's to boot from, to perform different functions with differen HATs
Since septenmber 2K25 my beloved consumer HDDs are getting much more expensive also
The LLM cycle of tsunami like destruction is not just 6nm IC's
It’s about everything datacenter wise
What is needed in a datacenter?
• H2O O2 N2 CU
•• you need water and those gasses to keep the natural flow of air running in your massive building which looks more like an Amazon storage facility than a computer server building.
• sand / grounds / realistate
• steel and iron
•• without those your facility can't even be build
• AC \ DC {not our beloved metal band ;)}
•• you need to power the servers, JBOD enclosures & HDDs, SSD enclosures to cache the HDDs, fibre optic backbones, CU cabling & rails, circuit breakers, switches
• AC regulation
•• AC regulation is a whole seperate topic which I'll touch briefly
••• I setup matrix UPS systems which take the AC from the grid, convert it to DC then make their own super stable PFC corrected AC for the server racks
••• This guarantees stable power on all rails in the datacenter
• AC is also generated on our own AC generator matrix
•• Some generators (in FIFO sequence) run concurrently with AC
•• When AC grid failures occur these generators give power within a few seconds to the UPS matrix, which keep feeding the rails in the buildings
•• The other generators spool up and stabilize fast keeping the datacenter running smoothly on power
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#LLM #HDD #SSD #DRAM #NAND #AI #microSD #USB #stick #hardware #technology #backup #datacenter #UPS #PFC #AC #DC #capacitor #components #computer #server #crises #boom #bubble #burst #DDR4 #DDR5
#Love #calm #resolve
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