vegetaAI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year
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.
TheReturnOfPEBWestern Digital chief Tiang Yew Tan told analysts “We’re pretty much sold out for calendar '26. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers.”
the dow is 50k and 37% of the DOW is made up of those seven
freaking financial centipede
that crash and burn will be the onus of the consumer not being able to consume.
we will lose access to free range computing and have to live with asking AI for permission to use the computing power to play a game or pay our bills.
that will be the crash and burn victims here.
CorrectAliasIt needs to crash. If it doesn’t crash soon, things will only get worse and worse for consumers. We’re already over the edge of the cliff (imo), it’s just a matter of how far we have to fall now. If it crashes hard enough, we won’t have to live with “asking AI for permission to use the computing platform”. By the way, an LLM isn’t really capable of that at the moment, and the sooner it crashes, the less likely anything like that will happen.
I brought my 2003 laptop back to life for shits and giggles recently. It’s made me realize how bloated software has become. It’s still just as usable as it was 20 years ago when you remove all the fancy crap and use programs designed for tasks rather than living in a web browser. Sure its not fast, but once I replaced the spinning drive with an ssd, it became pretty damn usable in a modern day scenario. I really thought I would just upgrade as far as I could for fun, then slap an old archived distro on there from my college days for some good old PTSD/nostalgia. But it’s actually usable so I occasionally pull it out and do stuff on it. I’m ready to slap jaunty jackalope on it and relive going to my uni’s library to write a 10 page research paper thats due the next day, but it’s still ready to rock in modern times.
This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥
Snot FlickermanWe 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.
I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware
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.
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.
Definitely same.
In a similar boat, I’ve thought about that but if I ever upgraded to a stronger real centralized PC I’d have to do a bunch of Docker setup and if anything breaks my whole system would go down. As it is, with piecemeal shitass laptops each running individual services I get lots of redundancy!
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.
This is illegal but I’m sure it happens all the time.
Yeah, that’s how politicians get the insider tips, it’s bribes to not go after the person who gave them the tip.
If enough of the right people make enough money, then everything about it becomes legal, or at worse a fine that’s less than the profits made.
Fuck AI
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
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.
tensor_nightly69I’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.
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…
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.
It’s honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days…
Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.
So to clarify, what’s good is:
A product that was sent back to manufacturer and “manufacturer refurbished” meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it’s still working
Pretty much anything else, would be bad.
An example of what is bad is:
“Amazon/ebay refurbished” where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.
Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that’s where we can find deals.
I think I’ve got a 1TB that’s ~20 years old I got that way. It’s still technically in my main PC, but at this point it’s an important archive drive that just doesn’t get read or wrote very often.
I’ve just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don’t know why people act like they’re disposable parts of a PC still.
My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base
Yeah, it’s just typical capitalism stuff.
People see talk about legit refurbs and then think a dust wipe refurb isnthe same thing and get ripped off.
I think people are downvoting because this statement of “buy used” simplifies things to kinda put it on people who want to purchase drives and aren’t data center customers. HONESTLY, even buying used hardware, you’re going to be seeing a spike in prices because available stock is going to be what it is and the demand is only going to grow.
Also, buying used for something you want to protect your data is ALWAYS going to be a risky proposition, even if HDD tech and improved and become stupid reliable.
ALSO ALSO, there are scammers everywhere. When you buy used, you take a higher risk of the seller shipping a box of rocks.
ALSO ALSO ALSO, you don’t actually know what a drive’s been through until you get it.
… And we can keep going but the point is offering a simplistic solution to a big structural problem like the supply chain and corporate greed running amok is just pointing the finger at consumers when, at the end of the day, they didn’t start this mess.
I downvoted because look at serverpartdeals, the stock is horrific and what little is in stock is absurdly expensive
Yeah I’d imagine you’d have trouble finding a good deal there. I’ve had way more luck getting drives from eBay, thrift shops, yard sales and the local dump.
Also, by convincing everyone I know to just give me their old stuff that they think is no longer useful. They don’t want it taking up space anyway, and I get to harvest the useful bits and add them to my frankensteined home lab, then responsibly dispose of the rest. There have also been several machines I’ve acquired this way that I’ve repaired/made whole again, then provided to those who need them.
Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.
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 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.
It doesn’t matter who has it, it’s the one ring.
It’s sheer existence is too dangerous to be allowed. But everyone focuses on what they could do with the power and think they’ll be able to keep it.
That’s why there’s such pushback against opposition to datacenters, it’s not just the money from the stocks, everyone pictures themselves as the only ones who gets to abuse the tech once it’s built.
That’s literally the plot of the last two Mission Impossible movies.
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…
baronvonjI 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%…
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.
That’s a much more sophisticated setup than mine! It may even be overkill (depending on what it is you want to host, and to how many).
I’ve been running two enterprise-grade Toshiba 16TB drives in a btrfs RAID1 since last summer. No SSD for caching (though the OS and my Docker containers run on one, with regular syncs to the slower spinning drives). No complaints so far.
I know it is a bit complex, but after seeing the shenanigans Synology tried to play and reading review about Ugreen NAS units and how they seem to connect to external servers often, I just decided to roll my own TrueNAS build.
I am using an AMD Ryzen 4600G, 32GB of RAM, a 500GB boot SSD, the only mATX board I could find with six SATA ports, the Asus B550m Pro4 and a Corsair SF750 750W PSU to power it all.
Props for the powerful DIY! You’re right about the pre-built models. I’m coming from a QNAP one, and while they’re good for learning the ropes, they’ll become pretty limited after a while. That, and the shit they’re trying to pull with proprietary HDDs.
A self-made rig gives you a lot more flexibility, although it requires you to learn a bit more. But seeing that you’re already getting comfortable with GFS, I guess you’ll manage just fine!
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what GFS is, I have been a Linux sysadmin for a few years, but never came across that.
We used LVM and ext4 for the storage in tjose VMs
If you’ve got that experience under your belt, you’ll be just fine. I haven’t tackled zfs myself yet (I’m lacking the RAM, plus I was put off by the ECC RAM recommendation). But I know it unifies a lot of the things you’re already familiar with under one roof (volume management and journaling) and adds more cool features (snapshotting, RAID, encryption) without you having to combine and manage several different technologies (mdadm for RAID, LVM, LUKS, …). I did that on my main rig and it turned out to be rather complex. Hence the switch to btrfs to at least squash a bit of complexity.
rose56The 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).\
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.
rogsson
ZacryonIt’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.
mycodesucksYou can use them fine. In fact, you’ll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.
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’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.
so much wrong with this title.
- it’s not AI, it’s LLM slop bullshit
- it’s not the software at guilt here, it’s the sacks of shit running those companies who plan such data centers
- blamed? No, those shitheads are totally and absolutely responsible for this clusterfuck.