they’re pushing for AI, but nobody will have a device to use it?
WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
11–20 of 205 posts
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#12I'll go against the grain and claim this might be a good thing long term. Yes, it sucks also, I was planning to expand my NAS but guess I'll figure out how to compress stuff instead.
Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now figure out a different solution to recover space, I'm hoping with a shortage this kind of thing will be more widespread, and we'll end up with smaller things until the shortage is over. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" or however it goes.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#13First they came for the GPUs, but I did not speak out, for I was not a gamer.
Then they came for the RAM, but I did not speak out, for I had already closed Firefox.
Then they came for the hard drives, but I did not speak out, for I had the cloud.
Then my NAS died, and there was no drive left to restore from backup.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#14It'll be fine. The supply chain for these components is inelastic, but that means once manufacturing capacity increases, it'll stay there. We'll see lower prices, especially if there is an AI crash and a mass hardware selloff like some people are predicting.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#15I'll go against the grain and claim this might be a good thing long term. Yes, it sucks also, I was planning to expand my NAS but guess I'll figure out how to compress stuff instead. Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now fig…
Think that's more of a "silver lining" instead of the overall trend being a "good thing long term." It's still pretty terrible.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#16Damn. First GPUs, then RAM, now hard drives? What's next, the great CPU shortage of 2026?
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Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#17Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.
If it’s temporary I can live with it.
I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#18If component prices keep going up and the respective monopoly/duopoly/triopoly for each component colludes to keep prices high/supply constrained, then eventually devices will become too expensive for the average consumer. So what’s the game plan here? Are companies planning to let users lease a device from them? Worth noting that Sony already lets you do this with a ps5. Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#19[flagged]
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#20they’re pushing for AI, but nobody will have a device to use it?
I feel traditional "rust" hard disks would be inefficient for AI use. Unless they include SSDs (which I feel these data centers are more likely to be using) in the definition as well...