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

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

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 328 posts

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

#241

Post by danny_codes »

55555 wrote: post #49

What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?

Speaking from personal experience.. we treat cloud storage like an infinitely deep bucket. At rest data efficiency is not really a consideration because compute costs are so absurd. Why worry about a $2M year storage bill when your compute bill is $500M? It’s not worth the engineering time to optimize

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

#242

Post by delecti »

selectodude wrote: post #164
doom2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.

I feel like the most recent time you could reasonably get an nvidia *80 GPU at the store for a normal amount of money was almost a decade ago.

But that's a tautology. The Nvidia *80 GPU's MSRP has been unreasonable for that long (1080 launched at $600 May 2016, which IMO was already excessive).

But there was a window as recently as fall (3-5 months ago) where you could get most PC parts at MSRP. Granted it was a pretty short window, before the last dying whispers of crypto and COVID induced scarcity were overtaken by the surge of the AI bubble.

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

#243

Post by zozbot234 »

Fnoord wrote: post #199
pixl97 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If demand for hard drives is this high then it sounds like there wouldn't be near enough tape around either.

This is why I am buying a couple of LTO 6 tapes. Thus far I've been able to buy 4 for approx 120 EUR, 2,5 TB each. They have been around 30 EUR each the past years, and still are approx such price (leaning towards 35 EUR though). I bought a second hand drive for about 500 EUR, and a HBA for it.

Tapes are great for true cold storage (will easily last many decades!) but they will wear out significantly with more intense use: you only get a couple hundred passes total over their full data capacity, either read or write. In practice, you still need plenty of big hard disks to act as nearline storage for practical use, and the tape only rarely does storage and retrieval in bulk. This is also why you see mechanical tape libraries with tens or hundreds of tapes for a single read/write unit: you don't really need more than that.

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

#244

Post by zarzavat »

voidUpdate wrote: post #174
hnfong wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is "plagiarism" "bad"? Modern society seems to assume any work by a person is due to that person alone, and credits that person only. But we know that is not the case. Any work by an author is the culmination of a series of contributions, perhaps not to the work directly, but often to the author, giving them the proper background and environment to do the work. The author is simply one that built upon the aggrega…

Sure, you can't claim ownership of ideas, but if you verbatim repeat other people's content as if it is your own, and are unable to attribute it to its original creator, is that not a bit shitty? That's what LLMs are doing

If a human learns to code by reading other people's code, and then writes their own new code, should they have to attribute all the code they ever read?

Plagiarism is a concept from academia because in academia you rise through the ranks by publishing papers and getting citations. Using someone else's work but not citing them breaks that system.

The real world doesn't work like that: your value to the world is how much you improve it. It would not help the world if everyone were forced to account for all the shoulders they have stood on like academics do. Rather, it's sufficient to merely attribute your most substantial influences and leave it at that.

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

#245

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#246

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

> under constant threat of invasion

And isn't it also in a seismically active region, also prone to eathquake and/or tsunami?

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

#247

Post by Forgeties79 »

dgxyz wrote: post #130
Forgeties79 wrote: post #16

I bought 6x refurbished ultrastars for ~$100/ea Black Friday 2024. They were over $200/ea 2025. Samsung T7 (and shield) SSD’s have 2x-3x. Can’t get 1TB for less than like $180 right now. It’s ridiculous

Bought a few 2TB T7 shield disks last year before the boom. Thank fuck I did it then.

Take good care of them!

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

#248

Post by slashdev »

spwa4 wrote: post #220
slashdev wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet the same thing happens when the AI bubble pops. "but this time is different, it's not a bubble, there's real value there" Economists use the term “bubble” to describe an asset price that has risen above the level justified by economic fundamentals, as measured by the discounted stream of expected future cash flows that will accrue to the owner of the asset. I think there's little argument that is happening, the…

If it's a bubble that big it's 1) the only reason any part of the economy is growing at all 2) the only reason US banks aren't bankrupt due to the commercial real estate debacle they got themselves into In other words, if this is a bubble, if this pops, we're back in the 2008 situation. Where banks will go bankrupt one after the other like dominoes (in the sense that this amount is large enough that large banks will…

I think you’re wrong.

Time will tell.

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

#249

Post by anthk »

pixl97 wrote: post #156
anthk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI's output is not reproducible. It's a disaster.

If we want reproducible output we already have conventional software. Stop using a hammer on screws.

Good luck in a near future. Science be damned modulo the users of reproducible software and distros.

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

#250

Post by tasuki »

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…

> Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI.

Cheap hard drives and ram, yay! Perhaps GPUs too!

Post reply on HN