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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

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Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#231

Post by jayd16 »

numpad0 wrote: post #131
ghywertelling wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier gamers got punished by crypto and now they are being punished by AI.

GPUs before crypto had a lot less amount of VRAM. Crypto investment funded a lot of stupid experiments, of which some did stick to the wall. I don't think gamers had lives completely ruined by crypto in the end.

Crypto didn't need vram did it? It was just about hash rate no?

Besides, a 1080 had 8GB, a 5080 has 16GB. Double in 10 years isn't ground breaking. The industry put VRAM into industrial chips. It didn't make it to consumer hardware.

What games have had to deal with instead is inference based up-scaling solutions. IE using AI to sharpen a lower rest image in real time. It seems to be the only trick being worked on at the moment.

I can't think of anything useful crypto did.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#232

Post by geye1234 »

bachmeier wrote: post #195
markus_zhang wrote: post #69

Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long. What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer…

Time for folks to familiarize themselves with Linux distros designed to run on older hardware. My 2009 laptop runs great, with the exception of the browser. Oh and the fact that 32-bit software is harder and harder to find.

Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).

The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#233

Post by runjake »

throwworhtthrow wrote: post #206
runjake wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA

If this is actually true, I think you can find a more reliable source than Elon Musk. I'm not saying you should never listen to a word he says. His actions shape the world after all, so it's important to understand how his words precede his behavior. But I'm baffled why anyone would take Elon at his word, or even slightly hedge their perception of reality based on Elon's claims of fact.

I was leaving an HN comment, not writing an essay. I'm not fond of Elon's personality, but I listened to the context of the conversation and believe him.

Did you listen to the conversation? There was a great amount of detail. Which parts of the conversation seemed unbelievable to you?

Regardless, it's also been reported in the press over the past quarter, and TSMC's previously largest customer, Apple, notably has had to make fab adjustments and form new partnerships with Intel.

https://stratechery.com/2026/tsmc-risk/

https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-will-struggle-to-meet-ai-demand...

And even the TSMC CEO himself has acknowledged it on multiple news sources. Here's just one:

"Demand is 3 times higher than what TSMC can produce"

https://wccftech.com/tsmcs-ceo-admits-chip-production-is-ins...

Hopefully, the CEO of the company in question is good enough for you?

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#234

Post by zozbot234 »

pixl97 wrote: post #230
torton wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The housing market is a textbook example of the opposite of a free market. In most markets, anything that does not "improve the character of the neighbourhood" is impossible to build by design.

Most chunks of the computing market should be thought of as a text book example of a 'free' market that operates with collusion with the few well monied "competitors" ensuring they don't put each other out of business. Lets say you wanted to jump into the hard drive producing market. It's going to take you a few years to get there and a lot of billions of dollars. By the time you're close to producing units the exist…

The better way of putting it is that collusion is ultimately limited by the ease of entry into and exit from the market. The existing players don't need to "suddenly" drop the prices when a new entrant appears, because they've been doing that already.

It's only when supply bumps into short-term capacity constraints and price must rise enough to fully ration demand that this assumption fails. But then even if a new entrant appears that's no reason to drop prices unsustainably, because why would you? They're not taking any share of the market away from you, they're serving new demand.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#235

Post by squidbeak »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #13
glimshe wrote: post #8

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies. Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing t…

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…

The problem with this expectation of usual market behavior is that demand from AI will still be unsatisfied even after buying out the current providers' whole supply, so any new manufacturer entering the market will also prioritize high-paying AI companies above consumers.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#237

Post by antonyh »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
ErneX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those drives are SATA inside the case.

That depends on the brand. The lower priced brands, yes, those can be SATA, the more vertically integrated companies also make custom PCBs that just have USB-C without any SATA interface exposed internally.

I've shucked WD MyBook drives, just a plain SATA inside. I guess that it's cheaper to have a stock drive and a cheap SATA-USB adaptor in a shell than do custom electronics. I've not heard of any that are otherwise, but I've only done a few. I suppose it's possible that they could solder them in or have custom electronics but I would have thought that rare. It's frequently discussed on Reddit too, so there's plenty of folk doing this.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#238

Post by danny_codes »

shimman wrote: post #117
robinwhg wrote: post #103

It'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…

It's only this way because the American ruling class would rather ship jobs overseas to increase their wealth than competently establish an industrial sector that would pay good wages to average people. Turns out letting a bunch of MBAs plan your economy is extremely foolish.

Hey now they went to school for at least 1.5 years and not all of that was at a 9th grade reading level! Some of it was 10th grade

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#239

Post by antonyh »

zozbot234 wrote: post #139
antonyh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as both, but UK suppliers have stock of various SATA HDDs available in large and small sizes. It's hard to say if prices will rocket or availability decline, or both. I don't normally advocate panic-buying, but if it's needed now is the time. I have one NAS spare on hand, I don't want or need a drawer full of them, but it'll be a royal pain if I do and can't get parts.

Lower performance/capacity consumer drives might be comparatively safe because there's Chinese end-to-end production capacity for those. Of course the price can still increase, but probably not that much.

Admittedly I've not been tracking price, only availability, and only in the size I might need.

Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

#240

Post by danaris »

m4rtink wrote: post #194
danaris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the demand drops for six months, the manufacturers are going to scale back production. If it drops for a year, they're likely to start shedding capacity, one way or another. This is not an equivalent situation. The vast, vast majority of what's being produced for this bubble is going to be waste once it pops.

I guess you could at least mine the boards from defunct AI companies for memory chips ? Latest videos from Gamers Nexus showed it is apparently not that hard to transfer memory chips from board to board. Then you can leach precious metals from the PCB itself.

Yes, but if they weren't overproduced and then either run into the ground or left waiting for demand that would never come, then wouldn't those memory chips and precious metals all still be more available than otherwise...?

I mean, sure, yes, we can try to recycle waste products—but it's still less wasteful not to produce them unnecessarily in the first place.

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