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

mashable.com

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

#311

Post by Qem »

pixl97 wrote: post #191
Gud wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Mass surveillance by corporations can be outlawed. Just because something is possible, doesn’t mean it must be necessarily so. I travel a lot for work to different nations. The cultural differences are stark. In the UK for example, they love their CCTVs. In Switzerland, they’re only allowed where they are deemed necessary.

I mean back in the cold war we started losing privacy to foreign governments. A parade of overhead satellites is capturing everything you do all the time. As much as we expound about the rule of law, might makes right if the population isn't vigilant. Simply put technology gives capability. In 1900 we didn't have the capability to monitor everything that everybody did all the time and keep those records their entire…

> A parade of overhead satellites is capturing everything you do all the time.

Kessler syndrome on the way to the rescue.

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

#312

Post by m4rtink »

squidbeak wrote: post #235
appreciatorBus wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

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.

Sure - the question is how long they can remain high-paying.

Looks like all the money reserves big companies have been sitting on are gone. Circular money deals are in full swing & now it looks like some companies are now looking for loans.

Not sure how much longer this can go on until it comes crashing down.

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

#313

Post by runjake »

throwworhtthrow wrote: post #272
runjake wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Did you listen to the conversation? No, and I'm sorry for derailing your point. Thank you for the additional links. I skimmed them all but didn't see anyone corroborate the claim that TSMC is limited by its upstream component suppliers, rather than its own factory underinvestment in prior years. Am I misunderstanding, and those two things are the same?

If you dig deep into the links I posted, they are reportedly constrained by construction of fabs along with acquiring enough ASML machines.

But, you are certainly correct that factory underinvestment is likely the primary cause for being in this predicament.

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

#314

Post by phil21 »

kldg wrote: post #299
aurareturn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

it all takes years. it takes years for permitting to open up the power plant to run the chips. at the scale the Big 3/4 (google, amazon, microsoft, and meta-ish) are going, we don't actually have the capacity to BUILD the capacity, despite a forecast of just 1% national electricity consumption growth this year, partly because we were expecting electricity demand to slow down and for an orderly shutdown of our fossil…

> because they don't really do as much peak draw anymore

This is the same for more or less all major industrial users of electricity. Typically it's a boon for a power grid and overall lowers prices due to the stable consumer that helps you achieve very high capacity factors on your generation side. Large industrial users typically pay for a "max usage rate" (e.g. they commit to 200MW and will always pay for 200MW even if they only use 180MW average that billing period) due to the infrastructure needed to serve them - so it's as close to guaranteed money a power grid operator is likely to ever get.

If we want to re-industrialize the nation to any meaningful degree, we are going to need more baseload. AI datacenters may be a bubble, but if we can't somehow leverage the unlimited free money being poured into this space to augment our electric grid and build generation capacity for the first time since the Greatest Generation, we will have entirely failed as a society. The fact we have made it more compelling for folks to work out private deals with nuclear power plant operators to go behind-the-meter vs. just taking it from the grid is utterly absurd and shows how absolutely impossible it is to get anything done these days. These were last-ditch options after operators got frustrated trying to do things the usual way with years to decades of delays.

What is really happening at a very high level zoomed out: As a nation we decided to stop investing in energy infrastructure for over 50 years, and we are now reaping what we have sown. Eventually you run out of the previous generation's infrastructure investments, and also run out of cheap parlour tricks like sending industry overseas and focusing on energy efficiency vs. actually building stuff.

We get to figure out how to build things again or die trying. The AI bubble has only brought the demand forward a few years - anyone paying attention to this sector knew grid instability was effectively written in stone without major changes. Take our electric grid out of the hands of politicians and put it back in the hands of engineers and planners that actually can do things. You can't even build a transmission line of any length or size these days without a decade or more of legal battles and NIMBY. Good luck with the actual size of investment we need today.

tldr; We deserve all the pain we collectively get. You can only ignore problems for so long to take short term gains. Chickens coming home to roost in this arena, among many others. Once you stop investing in the future, the future eventually comes for you.

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

#315

Post by phil21 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #292
geye1234 wrote: post #290

I 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?

Spinning HDDs will eventually be at risk of failing for purely mechanical reasons, so beyond handling them with care you can't really do all that much. Keeping them always-on may be a viable strategy for drives that are already mostly on, otherwise, just spin them up once in a while, but don't expect this to lower risk significantly. An old drive should simply have its contents transferred to new media, and then be t…

I have found there is really no practical way to predict the bathtub curve for hard drive failures.

The solution is just a lot of redundancy for larger disk arrays whenever practical. I currently have a 15x1TB 7200 RPM zpool in raidz2 I use for "scratch space" for some automation projects. It writes about 500GB-1TB or so a day and has for... over 18 years. I have had exactly one drive fail from that pool, under heavy abuse. That one failed a year or two in. Prior to my personal use it was beat on (mostly reads) as backing storage for uploaded images for a large website where the drives operated at 90% or higher I/O utilization pretty much 24x7.

I have other pools of disks where I have replaced over 50% of them 6 years in, with batches of failures seemingly at random. You start to notice patterns with various drive models - but not until well after the point of purchase where it's far too late to predict based on anything like vendor reputation or whatnot. I've had batches of various WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and HGST all both be incredibly reliable and some incredibly not so. Some of the same model series just different drive sizes have wildly different reliability characteristics.

I don't bother pulling "old" drives out of production preemptively any more. The only thing I do preemptively now is pull drives with very critical SMART prefailure warnings such as a consistently growing number of unrecoverable sector errors. That one and a couple other attributes are worth watching trends for, but the rest are pretty pointless and really do not seem to correlate much. And again, it varies by drive model for which times to pay attention to a particular SMART attribute and which not to.

I simply treat drives as wear items that fail with little to no notice, and just make sure I can survive a number of simultaneous failures at once. Make sure to regularly test your monitoring!

Not power cycling drives is huge as well, as you note. For example these old 1TB spinners:

   9 Power_On_Hours          0x0012   078   078   000    Old_age   Always       -       158328
  12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       13

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

#316

Post by gck1 »

I'm wondering - if AI companies are looking at 'build your own saas' as their biggest moat that will make investors happy and drive profits to prevent bubble from bursting, surely hoarding up all the inventory that saas companies depend on directly isn't that great of an idea?

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

#317

Post by gck1 »

kalleboo wrote: post #296
trueismywork wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how hard AI is on I/O, while restarting if hardware might go second hand. I dont see hard drives go second hand. Most hardware that we get might be used beyond redeeming even at free price.

Actually used hard disks have gotten pretty popular in the past few years, with sellers like ServerPartDeals building up a reputation by selling drives that are properly tested and recertified. As long as you have redundancy and backups by all accounts they hold up pretty well.

SPD is out of stock as well for all their high capacity, manufacturer recertified drives.

Got the 20TB Seagate recert in May 2025 for $239. Now it's $500 and out of stock [1].

Got another 28TB Seagate recert in Sep 2025 for $398. Now it's $482 and out of stock [2]. Same drive, but seller refurbished is also OOS, but at $700.

I sure hope everything in my homelab NAS outlives the AI bubble. Otherwise, I'll have to shut it down, as getting a replacement for ANY part inside it is going to be stupid expensive. I'm at least thankful I went for DDR4 motherboard instead of DDR5.

[1] https://serverpartdeals.com/products/seagate-exos-x20-st2000...

[2] https://serverpartdeals.com/products/seagate-exos-st28000nm0...

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

#318

Post by hnfong »

voidUpdate wrote: post #302
zarzavat wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

If a human copies someone else's code verbatim, they should attribute the source, yes. If they learn from it and write original code, no, they don't have to cite every single piece of code they've ever read

Yes, you've stated the current social and legal rule we have to follow.

But I don't think you've given any moral justification for the rule, and in particular, why LLMs (who are not humans and have no legal rights or obligations) have to follow it.

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

#319

Post by AnimalMuppet »

hnfong wrote: post #318
voidUpdate wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human copies someone else's code verbatim, they should attribute the source, yes. If they learn from it and write original code, no, they don't have to cite every single piece of code they've ever read

Yes, you've stated the current social and legal rule we have to follow. But I don't think you've given any moral justification for the rule, and in particular, why LLMs (who are not humans and have no legal rights or obligations) have to follow it.

But some company owns the LLM, and they have legal rights and obligations. You don't get to use AI to launder breaking the law.

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

#320

Post by xpe »

soulofmischief wrote: post #178
xpe wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a policy area you like you might start there. From my lens, here are some interesting ways to look at political economy from a broader point of view: economic disruption from AI (could be from energy prices, labor substitution, and lots more), climate modeling and its impacts on economies, conservation and ecosystem stability, and economic growth under different levels of inequality. I would add this to t…

Those are definitely all areas of interest for me as well. Thanks for the pointers. Do you write anywhere?

Here, perhaps too often. I have been hoping to find better outlets.
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