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

WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

heise.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 205 posts

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

#141

Post by sireat »

After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans?

In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.

As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.

So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.

I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.

As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.

They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.

That is free market at work right?

In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects. Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.

So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?

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

#142

Post by cubefox »

Jach wrote: post #86
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…

You may have answered your own question if they're wanting to train models on video and other media.

So Veo (Google), Sora (OpenAI) or Seedance (ByteDance)?

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

#143

Post by mrtksn »

post-it wrote: post #130
mrtksn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No but you can switch and get comfortable with fully cloud based solutions when you your computer ages and the prices for the now one are through the roof.

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

#144

Post by notanastronaut »

dspillett wrote: post #98
lsp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phrasing. "It's not just X, it's Y," overuse of "quotes"

The problem with any of these tells is that an individual instance is often taken as proof on its own rather than an indicator. People do often use “it isn't X, it is Y” like constructs¹ and many, myself included sometimes, overuse “quotes”², or use m-dashes³, or are overly concerned about avoiding repeating words⁶, and so forth. LLMs do these things because they are in the training data, which means that people do t…

Much like the epidemic we're going through of "everything is fake", every comment that even has a whiff of these tells will automatically be dismissed at "AI".

I've find myself doing it, a time or two.

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

#145

Post by 63stack »

squeefers wrote: post #125
Fervicus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why doesn't that sound reasonable, when nvidia did exactly that?

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

#146

Post by zozbot234 »

sireat wrote: post #141

After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans? In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs. As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much. So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and a…

> As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

We have a long way to go before the average PC costs even half as much as it did in 1989 (adjusted for inflation). And of course the performance for typical consumer use is orders of magnitude better than it was back then.

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

#148

Post by iamnothere »

zozbot234 wrote: post #99
roysting wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.

In the same way that China is stepping into RAM production, I suspect they will step into the gap for high capacity drives as well. The market abhors a vacuum and China is eager to fill it, even at minimal levels of profit. Chinese manufacturers have become very good at providing an acceptable level of quality at a good price, maybe not the highest quality, but acceptable for consumer use.

I can understand that incumbents may not want to overinvest in capacity, which could be financially precarious, but they are also putting themselves in danger by opening up avenues for competition. One more thing ruined by AI mania, I suppose.

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

#149

Post by kasabali »

IshKebab wrote: post #129
kasabali wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really.

Really.

Source: I've been using Chrome's built in translation heavily since around 2018-19, and not before that only because that's the time I've realized it'd became god damn good.

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

#150

Post by embedding-shape »

63stack wrote: post #24
embedding-shape wrote: post #12

I'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…

There is an increasing chance the "invention" will be that nobody owns personal computers, and now has to rent from the cloud.

If anything the ecosystem is moving away from that, not into that. People seem more and more averse of relying on SaaS when local applications can do, but this might also be somewhat of a bubble I'm perceiving, rather than a global trend I suppose.
Post reply on HN