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WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

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

#131

Post by citrin_ru »

cubefox wrote: post #74

I'm confused, that doesn't make sense to me: > They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them. What type of training data? LLMs need relatively little of that. For example, DeepSeek-V3 [1], still a relatively large model: > We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens At 2 bytes per token, that's 29.6 terabyte…

A few random thoughts:

There are many new data-centers they are being filled with servers. Most servers have at least 2 HDD (mirror) for the OS. I would not be surprised if on a huge scale even 2 HDD per server could cause HDD shortage.

There are likely models which are trained on 4k video and it should be stored somewhere too.

Even things like logs and metrics can consume petabytes for a large (and complex) cluster. And the less mature the software the more logs you need to debug it in production.

In the AI race investments if not unlimited at least abundant. In such conditions optimization of hardware usage is the waste of time and velocity is the only things which matters.

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

#132

Post by stogot »

stingraycharles wrote: post #17
lccerina wrote: post #8

Everyone: 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.

I am afraid my NAS will have a hard drive failure, and I won’t be able to order replacements. I should’ve bought a back up

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

#133

Post by b3lvedere »

roysting wrote: post #83
b3lvedere wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.

You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry? Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.

I come from a time when people had to use 1 to a maximum of 48 kilobytes for their entire computer. Later on i once went to Helsinki to watch with my own eyes what people can program in a restriction of 4 to 64 kilobytes. Computers have amazed me, but people who used them, have amazed me a lot of more times.

I wasn't saying it'll be good and that the good guys win, but a lot of insane creativity to circumvent restrictions will pop up.

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

#134

Post by m4rtink »

zozbot234 wrote: post #75
m4rtink wrote: post #72

Looks like we need a computer hardware reserves the same way there are regional reserves for food, fuels and other critical commodities? And for the same reason - to avoid the dominant players going "oh shiny" on short term lucrative adventures or outright trying to manipulate the market - causing people to starve and making society grind to a halt.

The real "computer hardware reserves" is the used market. Average folks and smaller businesses will realize that their old gear now has resale value and a lot more of it will be entering the resale/refurbishment market instead of being thrown away as e-waste.

That is a very good point!

Still, at least in the short to medium term, there are many companies, institutions and individuals that are used to getting new hardware that is under warranty - developer hardware refreshes, store hardware updates and deployments, some schools and academic institutions that provide hardware to students or even just people getting a laptop for schools use.

I think people would be used to getting new hardware for all of these & might be pretty much left out cold without a machine or having to opt for a reused or resold machine without the necessary technical knowledge to support it themselves.

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

#135

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

dgxyz wrote: post #116
FrankBooth wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We useless eaters are to be priced out of life soon enough.

Traditionally that hasn't gone well for the rich folk.

It also hasn't gone well for the non-rich folk either.

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

#136

Post by m4rtink »

zvqcMMV6Zcr wrote: post #85
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.

Server grade hardware (rack blades) is already poor fit for consumer needs and AI dedicated hardware straight up requires external liquid cooling systems. It will be expensive to adopt them.

Strip it for usable parts (DRAM/VRAM/NANAD chips, maybe also some of the controllers), then recover any valuable metals (copper heat sinks, gold on contact pins), simple as that. :)

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

#137

Post by stockresearcher »

FMecha wrote: post #20
icf80 wrote: post #11

they’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...

In a large rack-mount SAN with hundreds or thousands of disks connected to your computing equipment via fiberchannel, the performance difference is pretty negligible.

The real advantage of SSDs in this use case is storage density and power efficiency. On the other hand, your compute resources might be packed in so tight with power-intensive stuff that you appreciate the spinning rust “wasting” space.

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

#138

Post by m4rtink »

citrin_ru wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #74

I'm confused, that doesn't make sense to me: > They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them. What type of training data? LLMs need relatively little of that. For example, DeepSeek-V3 [1], still a relatively large model: > We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens At 2 bytes per token, that's 29.6 terabyte…

A few random thoughts: There are many new data-centers they are being filled with servers. Most servers have at least 2 HDD (mirror) for the OS. I would not be surprised if on a huge scale even 2 HDD per server could cause HDD shortage. There are likely models which are trained on 4k video and it should be stored somewhere too. Even things like logs and metrics can consume petabytes for a large (and complex) cluster.…

So at least for HDDs it is unlikely they will have super custom "AI HDDs" like thay have with custom High Bandwidth Memory displacing regular RAM in fab output & being harder to reuse later.

So hopefully once they all go bust, there should be a lot of cheap enterprise HDDs on the marked as creditors pick through the wreckage. :)

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

#139

Post by croes »

ksec wrote: post #90

There hasn't been a better time in the past 15 years to push for a new video or image codec. Saving storage Space is important again. This is assuming most of what we stored are either images or video.

New video codecs needs hardware support for good performance means you need to buy new hardware. Not a good time for that.

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

#140

Post by pickleglitch »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #46
fastily wrote: post #18

If 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…

We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. There has been too many mergers in the component market. You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and do…

> We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job.

Could we though? Even if gerrymandering and voter suppression weren't already out of control, and getting worse, there are very few politicians who could or would do anything about all this.

Elections aren't going to save us.

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