Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 134 posts

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#111

Post by Scoundreller »

hdhrnnrkrkf wrote: post #109
Scoundreller wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were always better, but the price delta narrowed a lot because of HD price increases. If you only had space for 1 drive, you did have to choose between small capacity with high speed vs. High capacity and slower speeds. Plus (real or mythical) reliability issues with new tech.

But nobody was talking about the price delta then. The narrative was "for 300 bucks you can make your computer so much faster, best investment ever". No mention about increasing HDD prices, nobody cared.

If you’re made of money sure. For others, $300 for storage is a lot, but if it’s vs $200 vs $100, that has an impact on willingness to pay $300.

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#112

Post by jimmydorry »

jl6 wrote: post #38

Bitcoin ate all the GPUs and I said nothing because I was not a gamer. Now Chia wants to eat all the hard disks, and I am pissed . I declare war on hegemonizing proof-of-waste swarms. Burn the coins. I want that disk space back.

You don't think this is exciting? I couldn't care less about what causes a surge in demand, but if there is substantial pressure on the HDD manufacturers to improve any of the following, consumers will only benefit:

* lower price points ($/GB);

* speed;

* size;

* availability / supply.

Of course, it will suck in the short term if HDDs become much harder to find, but that should only last as long as the manufacturers believe this to be a short term trend.

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#113

Post by littlestymaar »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #95
graeme wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean chier, the verb. Chia means chia

Well the simple past tense / 3rd person of "chier" is precisely "chia", spelled exactly like that. The herb/plant "chia" always sounds a bit weird to my ears because it makes me think of the verb tense... "Il chia" / "He shat". So GP is totally correct.

GP is maybe “technically” correct, but given that «chier» is a slang verb mostly used orally while passé simple is almost never used orally and never in casual context, which means that you'll never use that tense on this verb in practice. “He shat” will 99.99% of the time be translated to «il a chié» (passé composé).

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#114

Post by littlestymaar »

capableweb wrote: post #52
fmajid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Chia” means “shat” in French.

"Chia" also refers to the plant "Salvia hispanica", that's Nahuatl/Mexicano.

In French too [1]. «Chia» as “shat” is a theoretical conjugation of the slang word «chier» that you'll never meet in practice.

[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(plante)

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#115

Post by MereInterest »

nine_k wrote: post #99
MereInterest wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not that much on an ongoing basis. It's also O(n) with respect to the amount of extra money you need in circulation. I think this isn't quite correct, but is even more in favor of fiat currency. Minting money costs in proportion to the number of bills/coins. If more value is needed, the denomination being printed can be changed to represent more value with the same cost. On the other hand, cryptocurrencies require…

Supplies of most crypto currencies are finite, and the currencies appreciate in general, see bitcoin and etherium. Supplies of most fiat currencies are effectively infinite, and the currencies depreciate in general, see virtually anything from USD to the currency of Zimbabwe.

While true, that's a bit of a non sequitur. The value represented by a currency isn't measured in units of that currency, but in terms of what can be bought with that currency. If that purchasing power goes up, then so does the incentive for launching an attack. Therefore, to maintain bitcoin's security, there must be a corresponding increase in mining costs to prevent such an attack from occurring.

Bitcoin requires energy expenditure proportional to the value represented by bitcoin. Anything less, and it is vulnerable to attack. Bitcoin fundamentally does not scale.

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#116

Post by hyperman1 »

humaniania wrote: post #102
hyperman1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary thing is, I don't know if I can trust him less than any 'reputable newspaper'. At least if this he says dumb things, someone on HN will call him out. The reputable source has only one voice, it will say anything that brings in extra money, and lots of invisible third parties will try to influence it.

"The scary thing is, I don't know if I can trust him less than any 'reputable newspaper'." Do you not know how professional journalism functions? You can verify decades of history with very limited retractions. There's good reason why people trust the New York Times.

Can't comment on the NYTimed, as I am not from the USA. But there is a huge rift between usefull and not wrong.

There is the whole Gell-Mann amnesia thing. There is the basic selection of which news is important and which facts are relevant for it. There is the bias in reporting. Each of these can make an article untrustworthy without needing any retraction.

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#117

Post by rameshs »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
oceanplexian wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t get the sustainability argument.. Who decided that all computing must be for a sustainable or meaningful purpose? Cryptocurrency, as wasteful as it might appear, is like a drop in the ocean compared to the data centers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Likes on Facebook provide much less value to society than a distributed currency that circumvents central control over the financial system. Second, Cr…

> Cryptocurrency, as wasteful as it might appear, is like a drop in the ocean compared to the data centers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. It isn't, as 'mytherin points out. > Likes on Facebook provide much less value to society That's absurdly untrue. For all the warts of big social media players, they still provide tremendous social value - rich long-distance communication, organizing ad-hoc groups of people (…

Very well written

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#118

Post by dannyw »

fpgaminer wrote: post #92
nullc wrote: post #32

It's really important that manufacturers start responding to cryptocurrency induced shortages with auctions. The demand from the cryptocurrency users will be extremely high until they've spent a particular amount in total. They can do that with 1000 units, or with 5000 units. Obviously auctioning off units would be bad for having predictable prices for retail customers but that is irrelevant if aggressive miner buyin…

1) Nvidia et al. have to work with Big Retail (tm) [i.e. Walmart, Target, Best Buy]. Big Retail isn't interested in doing auctions. They function off the tried and true MSRP model. No matter how much money is being left on the table. This applies just as much to GPUs and hard drives as it does to the recent console shortages. I've worked with Big Retail execs before. They're old school and conservative (in the busine…

Miner demand for cards alone exceed all big retail sales. Sorry, but Walmart, Target and Best Buy can be made irrelevant now.

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#119

Post by nullc »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #58
nullc wrote: post #32

It's really important that manufacturers start responding to cryptocurrency induced shortages with auctions. The demand from the cryptocurrency users will be extremely high until they've spent a particular amount in total. They can do that with 1000 units, or with 5000 units. Obviously auctioning off units would be bad for having predictable prices for retail customers but that is irrelevant if aggressive miner buyin…

This is asinine. You would be making the product only available to those who can turn the highest profit from it and would lose the rest of your customer base to your competitor who is smart enough to not use an auction model. The entire cash flow would come from one narrow sector which would eventually collapse, leaving you with no customers. Business models evolve toward efficiency, and there is a good reason no on…

::sigh::

The alternative is that the product is completely unavailable. This is currently the situation across a broad swath of GPUs. Every unit that becomes available is instantly snatched up, in some cases by people who've bribed the people doing stocking at the distributors.

That is asinine. Yes, auctioning the limited supply off is also obnoxious but it is a strictly no worse than being entirely unavailable. Auctioning it of also has the benefit of depleting the uncontrolled demand faster (which is often taking the form of 'buy $x million in parts, however much we can get'). It potentially helps expand the supply (though unfortunately lead times and tooling make it hard to expand supply for surge loads), and for some cases where paying an astronomical price would be justified it would preserve some access to the product.

But the main motivation for my suggestion is to deplete the resource of the parties buying 100% of the stock as quickly as possibly so that the market can get back to normal. If that doesn't work it's because the money fountain is simply too large, and at some point the increased revenue will justify increasing the supply (even though doing so is risky).

> Business models evolve toward efficiency, and there is a good reason no one is doing this.

Sorry, but that isn't how 'evolve towards' works. Sure, eventually. But this kind of demand is unusual and surprising, it presents new challenges. There may be good reasons why what I suggest wouldn't be a good idea but those reasons are not "if this were a good idea they'd already be doing it".

Re: Thoughts on a “HDD shortage” from an industry insider

#120

Post by acidbaseextract »

scientismer wrote: post #68
99_00 wrote: post #34

I've never built a PC. I expect the crytpocurency bubble to collapse because my tech ignorant accountant friend asked what I know about building a crypto mining rig. What should I read to prepare myself to take advantage of the cheap used high end hardware that will hit the market do build a Windows or Linux system for my own pleasure.

I wouldn't count on the cheap hardware, it may be pretty much broken after endless full power use for mining.

To echo the other commenters, mining is pretty gentle on GPUs insofar as constant use goes. ETH is memory bandwidth limited, so cards can be heavily undervolted and underclocked (while overclocking memory) saving power without negatively affecting hashrate. More power is wasteful. Typical ETH mining GPU temps are around 60C. I'd feel ok about buying a used card off someone who knows what they're doing mining.

The 3080 and 3090 are the singular exception. The GDDR6X runs extremely hot and frankly I think it's going to cause a bunch of early failures for even non-mining cards.

Post reply on HN