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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

#171

Post by ethbr1 »

Analemma_ wrote: post #158
ethbr1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI. Hyperscalars refresh hardware and firesale old stock. ~2028 is going to see a lot of high power refurb supply hit the market.

Do they? When I was at AWS in 2019-2021 there were some servers in the fleet— not many, but they definitely existed— which dated to before 2010. Maybe it depends on the type:class, but I think hyperscalers run hardware until it dies, then junk it. Where have you seen hyperscaler hardware for sale?

Non-standard racks (Meta?) started showing up on the aftermarket around the time that Meta and a few other folks were the only ones using them.

Forget the details, as it's been a decade+, but everything gets junked at some point.

They're almost always stripped down, then sold as board+chassis only.

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

#172

Post by brador »

malfist wrote: post #152
brador wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truer than even you dare to admit. How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population. What’s the opposite of survivor bias?

It takes a profound lack of empathy to refer to your neighbors as "useless living humans"

It is meant in the capitalist sense. Your horror at the statement is the point.

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

#174

Post by alecco »

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…

> Power supplies, fans?

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1q9zd0f/power_sup...

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

#175

Post by alecco »

adornKey wrote: post #80

Do the guys that buy out the market have real use for all the hardware - or is it just hype? A solution against investors trying to corner the market would be to sell virtual hardware. Let them buy as much options on virtual "to be delivered" hardware" as they want. We also need an option market for virtual LLM-tokens, where the investors can put all their money without affecting real people.

Sam Altman (just yesterday): Codex weekly users have more than tripled since the beginning of the year!

https://twitter.com/sama/status/2023233085509410833

Funny how they all meet at the "You'll own nothing" Swiss club.

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

#176

Post by ElevenLathe »

shit_game wrote: post #128
kuerbel wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

Presumably the answer is the same as nearly every real problem we face today: organize. Yes, it will be tough to organize around this problem specifically, but imagine a truly muscular working class movement like once existed in the early 20th century in many places: they raised armies, published their own newspapers, ran radio stations, started universities, even ran cooperative factories, all under the active opposition of capital. Surely a modern version of such a movement would recognize the need for secure, trustable, affordable, ad-free computing devices and invest accordingly.

It will take decades to build this power, just like it did then, but the alternative (which we are witnessing in slow motion in the meantime) is too grim to let stand.

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

#177

Post by LoganDark »

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.

> so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks

Since when have developers ever lowered hardware requirements? Prosumers will just cough up the extra money while casual users will continue to be left in the dust, like they have been for practically the last decade (or longer).

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

#178

Post by wolvoleo »

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.

Many prices didn't really even come down much after COVID.

GPU prices never went back to normal. Harddrives neither, I bought 14TB drives 10 years ago for €200, they've never been that low again.

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

#179

Post by wolvoleo »

stogot wrote: post #132
stingraycharles wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Exactly, me too and at 10 years it's gonna happen :(

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

#180

Post by joecool1029 »

I already see the ‘save us China’ meme comments, but I want to go a step further and ask: Did they ever develop domestic HDD production (like of the tooling needed to make HDD’s)?

As I understand it, the technology holders for this specific line of technology are Korea (Samsung), Japan (Toshiba), and US (WD/Seagate).

I don’t think China ever developed the tooling internally? Am I wrong?

This feels like the ballpoint pen situation. Where China could build everything but the ballpoint since it took specialized machinery. But HDD gets to be a hard sell with how far NAND has come, and China could just lean on economies of scale here and skip the hard work of what at some point could become overcomplicated abandonware technology. Similar to approach between internal combustion cars and EV’s…

EDIT: And I am very aware production happens in places like Thailand, I don’t forget the flood pricing, I also don’t forget clamcoin shortages. Specifically mean where the core expertise is held.

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