HDDs, RAM, and chips have so many health metrics and methods that you really shouldn't be afraid to buy them used. The only special requirement is a RasPi test rig. That and a 30 day return window.
Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
181–190 of 328 posts
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
The premise of this news is that prices are going to climb and availability is going to drop. And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore. Walmart sells what appears to be an older version of the drive and I might have to cross my fingers and just get one of those.
> And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore. Isn't that what you're doing ordering off amazon with their comingled inventory? Besides, there's a spectrum of sellers between "Amazon" and "anybody", you can even, perhaps, purchase directly from the manufacturer.
I meant that after the Amazon experience, I don't want to buy a HDD online. Would much prefer to get it locally in person.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying that data center buildouts can't overshoot demand but AI and compute is different than fiber buildout. The more compute you have, the smarter the AI. You can use the compute to let the AI think longer (maybe hours/days/weeks) on a solution. You can run multiple AI agents simultaneously and have them work together or check each other's work. You can train and inference better models with more compute. S…
Did you pay attention in computer science classes? There are problems you can't simply brute-force. You can throw all the computing power you want at them, but they won't terminate before the heat-death of the universe. An LLM can only output a convolution of its data set. That's its plateau. It can't solve problems, it can only output an existing solution. Compute power can make it faster to narrow down to that exis…
LLMs are considered Turing complete.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#184This is all basically a textbook example of irrational market decisions. There’s clearly a bubble and not enough money coming in to pay for the AI bonanza. It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the…
More reckless and irresponsible than irrational.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#185HDDs, RAM, and chips have so many health metrics and methods that you really shouldn't be afraid to buy them used. The only special requirement is a RasPi test rig. That and a 30 day return window.
I feel like the goal is to avoid buying something broken in the first place, not just to be able to tell if you've bought something that turns out to be broken
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Silicon Valley" doesn't get to make the decision unless they are willing to send some of those hundreds of billions to TSMC up front. (TSMC isn't going to want future promises of business either since those are worth very little.)
I don't disagree. I wrote the top comment here basically saying the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46764223 If big tech prepays for the entire fab, I think TSMC would do it.
And if the Big Tech companies think it is so important to get all those compute and/or memory chips sooner and in larger supply, it should be no problem at all for those Big Tech companies to pay for the costs and then have priority access to all (or their portion of) the output for the future years.
OTOH, if they are insisting on not investing their funds or stock, and it is simply pressure on TSMC to take on the risk, TSMC should be very wary of taking on risk for those players (unless TSMC sees another advantage of producing into a likely glut or supply canyon shortly after the new fabs come online).
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years…
I'll add that the GPU, CPU, storage, and RAM industries crashed in 2022 after a Covid-induced boom.[0] Everything was cheap. Samsung sold SSDs at a loss that year. TSMC and other suppliers did not invest as much in cap ex in 2022 and 2023 because of the crash. Parts of the shortage today can be blamed by those years. Of course ChatGPT also launched in late 2022 and the rest is history. [0]www.trendforce.com/presscent…
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this is why the prices of housing has dropped dramatically. The market stepped up and filled the demand needed and now everyone can afford a place to live .....
I can't tell if the comment is above is sarcastic or serious: it could go either way.
This is 100% serious as it has not gone this way in the US. Housing prices keep going up in general and NIMBYism has stopped a massive amount of density growth.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#189It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers. I don't know if TSMC has any…
> rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island
Isn't this just taking the oft-proposed explore vs exploit dichotomy to the logical conclusion of the "exploit" side?
Every single arbitrarity-finely-divided thing "should" be handled by the single (group|process) that has the greatest relative advantage at that one thing.
And you end up with the total variety/detailedness of everything matching what the substrate of the economy (ie, people with specialized training or education) has capacity to support. So at the limit there is at most one person who knows how to do any one specific thing.
(And the global economic system becomes infinitely fragile, but eh who's counting.)
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are indeed planning for more fabs, in order to meet volumes. Last week: “TSMC's board approves $45 billion spending package on new fabs” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
Silicon Valley is arguing that TSMC isn't investing enough. They should be investing hundreds of billions to build fabs, like how big tech is investing in the AI buildout. $45 billion for new fabs is peanuts compared to Amazon's $200b and Google's $180b investment in 2026. Can't really blame TSMC though. It takes years for fabs to go from plan to first wafer. By the time new fabs go online, demand might not be there.…
According to Elon during his recent Dwarkesh podcast appearance[1], TSMC is limited by resource constraints (fab components, contractors, etc). His claim is that TSMC is building as fast as they can and they are unable to meet industry demand.
Seems legit to me. Nonetheless, I think it's a solvable problem.