the current spikes tempt me to sell off my home lab. a mac mini to sell to the open claw bros, 5tb HDD, Intel NUC, some SSDs, and a 5 year old dell laptop. can always buy back after the crash.
Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
281–290 of 328 posts
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you mean the big ones or the SSD ones?
The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure.
I have a old WD small one that's kinda faulty (plugged it in then put it down heavily, it's not been right since), I should pop it open just to see what's inside, but it's older than the USBC models so could easily have changed. In any case, I don't think AI is eating the stock of slow laptop HDDs, so I'm not sure there's any need to buy these just for shucking.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think MS value has been inflated by AI, if anything it's value has decreased from it's AI investments. MS has mostly been on it's same growth path for the last decade.
I think you haven’t been paying attention to the market then over the last couple years. Despite getting hammered recently, it is still up 100% from 2023 lows.
Am I crazy? MSFT has was up about 100% in the prior three years before 2023 as well, and again for the three years before that.
AI has had very little to do with MSFT growth. Pretty sure the 2023 lows were a response to the massive AI spending, and the recovery mostly due to continued Azure services growth.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mechanic…
Yes, I will use them as cold storage, nothing else. Right now, I have the following scheme:
1x a live server (Proxmox, NAS, firewall, and various other capabilities). 2x RAID1 enterprise NVMe, with NAS storage on RAID1 HDDs. 12th gen Intel, so relatively power friendly apart from the enterprise HDDs. 10 gbit local, remote 1 gbit fiber.
1x a live backup server in same city. Syncs every night. I should disable it otherwise, but I don't as of now, since it also gets a livestream of my doorbell camera (I don't use cloud for it). Has 1 gbit fiber, and RAID-1. Runs OS off RAID-1 (cannot add NVMe, older Synology, well maybe USB3 would work, but I'd rather not).
1x a backup server in same location as my home server which auto starts and syncs every week. This is my main old server, a Xeon so not very power friendly. Also RAID-1 NVMe. 10 gbit local.
1x a remote cloud (Norway), to have another copy of the most important data. Doesn't contain everything. Costs me only 50 EUR/year.
So that is a lot of copies of the same data, and quite frankly I not need this many. For the HDDs I want to get rid of RAID-1 and use either RAID-0 or JBOD, doubling the available data (I'm at the max as it is) while still having great data redundancy. And I will want to store my tapes off-site, although it wouldn't have the latest and greatest backups. I still have to look up how to do FDE with LTFS though, but I'll figure it out.
It also seems a good moment to sell some old hardware, given the current prices, but I am not sure if I will. Just something to ponder on later. You'd think I'd like to sell off the Xeon with its 30W CPU, but I quite like the machine (HP Microserver 10 Gen10 Plus). I'd rather sell the Synology which is still a decent machine, but I use voodoo to run recent software on it, and ZFS (with Homebrew / Nixpkgs). Tho neither is useful for ML.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mean the big ones or the SSD ones?
The big ones with a separate power brick, I've not looked inside the smaller USB-powered ones. My interest was in the >8Gb desktop drives. I'd imagine they're the same deal, but hard to say from the outside. I did have a part of one at one point, a USB-to-SATA circuit board that was useful for adhoc connecting 2.5" drives, but I can't recall if that came from an prebuilt or an old BYOD enclosure. I have a old WD smal…
Ok. So I have a bunch them here, different sizes, both SSD and spinning rust. The big ones are all consumer grade drives with a little adapter board like you describe. The small ones are a mix of a single custom board with a USB connector and adapter board based ones. The tell tale is the outer dimension in the length, if the case is a little bit longer than a standard drive you have a very good chance of having one with an adapter board if it is the same or even smaller than the standard format then almost all of them are custom boards. The really nice ones have NVME guts in them that you can immediately repurpose.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#286Earlier 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.…
Actual spending already out the door or pledges? Big difference vs. money spent and money planned.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#287Any point in setting my laptop to minimal power usage by default and drives to aggressively sleep, in order to try to extend life? Or is sleep and extra power cycle and better to not sleep my M2 drives so they aren't being powered up/down?
The main thing that shortens the lifetime of solid state drives is sustained writes over time. You should disable all system logging options and all "spotlight databases for fast search", avoid swap use and not let the drives "sleep" too aggressively since this will force the system to persist some volume of writes from RAM to disk that might have turned out to be unnecessary down the road.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#288It'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…
There are three pillars for the bleeding edge, aren't there? TSMC, ASML, and the Spruce Pine quartz mine.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
That only works out if there are enough investors willing to pay for those futures. If the new factory can make a billion drives but they only have 2 of those futures contracts sold (that is 200k drives) they don't build the factory. Remember too if they sell those contacts they are on the hook to deliver - if it is just investors they will accept the street value of 100k drives in 2028 but some of the people might b…
> If the new factory can make a billion drives but they only have 2 of those futures contracts sold (that is 200k drives) they don't build the factory. But the AI companies are flush with cash and trying to buy everything, right? Why wouldn't they buy up as many futures contracts as the fab company needs to justify more fabs? > Every year a few farmers realize they are contracted to deliver more grain than they have…
That is the question - will those ai companies buy the contracts
edit: actually it is worse - who else isn't buying contracts - if they build new capactity on contracts and ai collapses the existing users will take up the contracts but the old capacticy is unused.
Re: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
#290I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.
How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?