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WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

heise.de

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Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#121

Post by coffeebeqn »

zozbot234 wrote: post #115
greatgib wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly looks highly suspicious to me. Because ok they might need some big storage like petabits. But how can this be a match in proportion with the capacity that is currently usually needed for everything that is hard drive hungry. Any cloud service, any storage service, all the storage needed for private photo/video/media storage for everything that is produced everyday, for all consumer hardwares like computers..…

If you're building for future training needs and not just present, it makes more sense. Scaling laws say the more data you have, the smarter and more knowledgeable your AI model gets in the end. So that extra storage can be quite valuable.

If you’re building a text-only model then the storage is limited but once you get to things like video then it’ll explode exponentially

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#122

Post by bayindirh »

phatfish wrote: post #119
bayindirh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this ironic to use AI to formulate a comment against AI vendors and hyperscalers. It's not ironic, but bitterly funny, if you ask me. Note: I'm not an AI, I'm an actual human without a Claude account.

I wonder what the ratio is of "constructive" use of AI is, verses people writing pointless internet comments. It seems personal computing is being screwed so people can create memes, ask questions that take 30 seconds to find the answer to with Google or Wikipedia, and sound clever on social media?

If you think AI as the whole discipline, there are very useful applications indeed, generally in pattern recognition and regulation space. I'm aware a lot of small projects which rely on AI to monitor ecosystems, systems or used as nice regulatory mechanisms. Also, same systems can be used for genuine security applications (civilian, non-lethal, legal and ethical).

If we are talking generative AI, again from my experience, things get a bit blurry. You can use smaller models to dig data you own.

I personally used LLMs, twice up to this day. In each case it was after very long research sessions without any answers. In one, it gave me exactly one reference, and I followed that reference and learnt what I was looking for. In the second case, it gave me a couple of pointers, which I'm going to follow myself again.

So, generative AI is not that useful for me, uses way too much resources, and industry leading models are well, unethical to begin with.

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#124

Post by squeefers »

ahsillyme wrote: post #68
olavgg wrote: post #19

[flagged]

> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center. Yep. My take is that, ironically, it's going to be because of government funding the circular tech economy, pushing consumers out of the tech space.

> pushing consumers out of the tech space.

post consumer capitalism

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#125

Post by squeefers »

Fervicus wrote: post #110
fnands wrote: post #6

Damn. First GPUs, then RAM, now hard drives? What's next, the great CPU shortage of 2026?

What's next is no custom built PCs. They want us running dumb thin clients and subscribing to compute. Or it will be like phones. We'll get pre-built PCs that we aren't allowed to repair and they'll be forced to be obsolete every few years.

"they"? i see companies jacking their prices up, plain and simple. and us idiots still pay. ask yourself does intel no longer wish to sell CPUs to consumers? doesnt sound reasonable that intel would want to decimate their main market so AI companies can rule the world for some reason

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#126

Post by squeefers »

tjpnz wrote: post #63
steve1977 wrote: post #31

Time for some heavy regulation

That's not going to happen when AI is already propping up a significant chunk of the economy. There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott but not much coordination on targets.

> There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott

its not being used anywhere lol where are they meant to boycott?

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#128

Post by shit_game »

kuerbel wrote: post #102
shit_game wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the result of the long-planned desire for consumer computing to be subscription computing. Ultimately, there is only so much that can be done in software to "encourage" (read: coerce) vendor-locked, always-online, account-based computer usage; there are viable options for people to escape these ecosystems via the ever growing plethora of web-based productivity software and linux distributions which are genuin…

What can we do? Serious question. It's so hard to grasp as a problem for the lay person until it's too late.

Honestly; I don't know. I don't think there really is a viable solution that preserves consumer computation. Most of the young people I know don't really know or care about computers. Actually, most people at large that I know don't know or care about computers. They're devices that play videos, access web storesfronts, run browsers, do email, save pictures, and play games for them. Mobile phones are an even worse wasteland of "I don't know and I don't care". The average person doesn't give a shit about this being a problem. Coupled with the capital interests of making computing a subscription-only activity (leading to market activity that prices out consumers and lobbying actions that illegalize it), this spells out a very dire, terrible future for the world where computers require government and corporate permission to operate on the internet, and potentially in ones home.

Things are bad and I don't know what can be done about it because the balance of power and influence is so lopsided in favor of parties who want to do bad.

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#129

Post by IshKebab »

kasabali wrote: post #82
littlecranky67 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, heise is a german news site, and the very article is auto-translated by AI from its german counterpart.

Machine translation have become pretty good long before AI hype started.

Not really.

Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

#130

Post by post-it »

mrtksn wrote: post #61
post-it wrote: post #14

It'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.

If it takes 2 years to increase, after 2 years everything will be thin clients already. Completely locked in, fully under control and everybody used to it. Very dystopian TBH.

You're going to throw out all your computers in two years?
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