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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

#91

Post by bluGill »

high_na_euv wrote: post #56
ghywertelling wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So what? Why gamers must be the most important group?

Gamers are important because they are consistent customers. Crypto buying of GPUs is done (anyone still in this area is buying ASICs). Meanwhile gamers are still buying GPUs - they do sometimes hold off when the economy doesn't allow, but you can trust that gamers will continue to buy GPUs to play their games and thus they are a safe investment. It is rational to sell CPUs to a gamer for much less than someone in crypto because the gamer will be back (even if the gamer "grows up" there are more replacing them). Thus gamer is an important group while crypto is not.

The above was their prediction during the crypto boom and it turns out correct. I'm not sure how AI will turn out, but it isn't unreasonable to predict that AI will also move to dedicated chips (or die?) in a few years thus making gamers more important because gamers will be buying GPUs when this fad is over. Though of course if AI turns out to be a constant demand for more/better GPUs long term they are more important.

Gamers are not the only important GPU market. CAD comes to mind as another group that is a consistent demand for GPUs over the years. I know there are others, they are all important.

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

#92

Post by markus_zhang »

Ekaros wrote: post #90
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…

I have heard that you can get used laptops. But they do not come with memory or SSD anymore... As even used components are now valuable enough to be removed and sold.

Or worse, they have memory and SSD soldered on board, and are broken, so you have to learn soldering skills too.

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

#93

Post by aurareturn »

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…

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/presscenter/news/20221123-11467.html

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

#94

Post by digiown »

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…

Bingo. A number of corporate interests don't want to let you own your personal computers for different reasons. Google/Apple wants you to get locked down devices, and cloud/AI providers want you to use their services from a weak client.

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

#95

Post by thephyber »

anthk wrote: post #79
aurareturn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. No, I think it is real demand. AI will cause shortages in everything from GPUs to CPUs, RAM, storage, networking, fiber, etc because of real demand. The physical world can't keep up with AI progress. Hence, shortages. AI simply increases computer use by magnitudes. Now you can suddenly use Seedance 2.0 to make CGI that would have cost tens of millions…

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

This is wrong for all LLMs which have a temperature setting.

And even if there were guaranteed to be non-deterministic, there is still lots of value in many aspects of content generation.

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

#96

Post by digiown »

Ekaros wrote: post #90
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…

I have heard that you can get used laptops. But they do not come with memory or SSD anymore... As even used components are now valuable enough to be removed and sold.

Many laptops from last few years have soldered memory. Your previous laptop's SSD can also be reused, since those don't die that quickly compared to the laptop.

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

#97

Post by robinwhg »

anonymars wrote: post #27
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…

If I remember during a previous GPU shortage (crypto?), Nvidia (and/or TSMC?) basically knew the music would stop and didn't want to be caught with its pants down after making the significant investments necessary to increase production Not to mention that without enough competition, you can just raise prices, which, uh (gestures at Nvidia GPU price trends...)

I believe the TSMC CEO said that in a recent interview. They're aware that their now biggest customer Nvidia has a less broad product portfolio than Apple and the high volumes they buy propably won't last. It's too much of a risk to plan more Fabs based on that.

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

#98

Post by bluGill »

arbuge wrote: post #68

I console myself with knowledge of the economics maxim that every supply shortage is usually, eventually, followed by a supply glut. One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...

I was thinking than until my NAS gave me a error on one of my harddrives, now I'm in the market for a replacement while I still have redundancy

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

#99

Post by BearOso »

aurareturn wrote: post #63
mrweasel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is going to be what fiber was to the dotcom bubble. Someone spend a lot of money on a lot of infrastructure, some of which is going to be incredibly useful, but sold for much less than it cost to build. Hardware just depreciates much much faster than fiber networks.

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 existing solution, but it can't make the LLM smarter.

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

#100

Post by ErneX »

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 see, but if you plan on shucking you obviously get ones you know are able to.
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