Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#22"we expect a supply shortage lasting years again" but NFT's are still a better investment opportunity than a new hard drive manufacturer.
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#23You could probably take this and replace HDD with SSD or RAM and it would be just as correct.
Well, the primary difference is that cloud providers go through HDDs almost as consumables, while RAM and SSD are generally more long lasting.
Contracts are set up in similar ways, but HDDs in general have more constraints baked in those contracts.
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#24TIL all it takes to be a reputable "industry insider" is an anonymous reddit account.
Do you really need to be an "industry insider" to make any of their observations? Nothing they said seems to require they be actual "industry insider".
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#25You could probably take this and replace HDD with SSD or RAM and it would be just as correct.
I don't believe these terms are interchangeable, especially when this writeup is in response to Chia. Is it possible SSD or RAM have a similar bottleneck like read/write heads? Yes, but I don't know the answer.
> Is it possible SSD or RAM have a similar bottleneck like read/write heads?
Yes. You could replace "read/write heads" with "chips" and it'd apply just as easily to SSD and RAM. Texas's freak weather shut down Samsung's Texas fab which caused a shortage of SSD controller chips, for example. After the February outage, I don't think they started to tape out again until April.
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#26Hm, based on this I ordered 1x16TB and 2x14TB HDD drives right away (the maximum allowed at that seller, ~60% surcharge to the price from a week ago). If HDDs/SSDs end up as obtainable as GPUs, we are going to experience some serious troubles... I somehow managed to get 3x3090FE but that was just super lucky timing.
I am not sure what grad student Deep Learning researchers are going to do?
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how pricing works where you live, but to get optimal pricing I usually have to wait a few months, or maybe even a year (black Friday). Given that all time lows for hard drive prices haven't budged much in the past few years, why buy every few months rather than stocking up when prices are low? Anyways for my data point: there was some external hard drives on sale for 5-10% higher than "optimal" prices. >…
Opportunity cost. By keeping my cash in bitcoin I can now buy (well, not with this shortage) 5 times more hard drives than last black Friday.
> By keeping my cash in bitcoin I can now buy (well, not with this shortage) 5 times more hard drives than last black Friday.
Probably only 4 after you pay the appropriate capital gains taxes, I'd hope. :)
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#28It's interesting that that's precisely where we are with video cards-- the easiest way to get one is to buy a prebuilt system from any of the big names.
It's really not much of a stretch to see HDs go to exactly that same pressure point.
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#29It's interesting that that's precisely where we are with video cards-- the easiest way to get one is to buy a prebuilt system from any of the big names. It's really not much of a stretch to see HDs go to exactly that same pressure point.
It's also next to impossible to get workstation boards with many PCIe slots and now that spreads even to "creator" boards. I guess mining is going to eat it all.
Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider
#30Sample size 1: every 3 months I need to buy a large hard drive (14TB+). I buy external USB ones since they are the cheapest. Since it was due, in the last couple of weeks I was scanning prices in Romania daily, in case I get lucky with a discount. In the last week, prices surged 60-100%, and stock disappeared for 4 TB+. I panicked and after a lot of scanning I managed to buy a slightly smaller one than I needed with…
Shortages are good. It's the perfect time to set up manufacturing capability, so nationalists can be happy. It's a good time to push for hire wages, workers should do it. If there is some alternative industrial process, now's the time to try it. This is no 70s oil moment, because there's no indication fewer widgets are being produced than prepandemic.
This doesn't change that the shortages are caused by processes with infinite appetites. The demand grows with the supply, for hardware used by cryptocurrencies. To me it looks like the polar opposite of sustainability, which is distressing.