No one can be surprised to see that all of these artificial "shortages" are impacting components with monopoly or few actors producers...
WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
91–100 of 205 posts
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
>If it’s temporary I can live with it. Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.
I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
> I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift
Big tech will be deemed "too big to fail" and will get a bail out. The tax payers will suffer.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#93No one can be surprised to see that all of these artificial "shortages" are impacting components with monopoly or few actors producers...
That's the electronics industry in general though. The shortages are real and a normal part of growing pains for any industry that's so capital-intensive and capacity constrained.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.
You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry? Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
People will find a way to not need as much RAM, and thus the devices that require it.
Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#95It'll be fine. The supply chain for these components is inelastic, but that means once manufacturing capacity increases, it'll stay there. We'll see lower prices, especially if there is an AI crash and a mass hardware selloff like some people are predicting.
The number of HDDs sold has been in decline for over a decade. I doubt there is massive appetite for expanding production capacity
On the other hand the total storage capacity shipped each year has risen, as a combination of HDDs getting larger and larger, and demand shifting from smaller consumer HDDs to larger data center, enterprise and NAS HDDs. I'm not sure how flexible those production lines are, but maybe the reaction will be shifting even more capacity to higher-capacity drives with cutting-edge technology
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#96Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.
> I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.
Just like the price of labour. Your salary went up and doesn't come down
In the UK weekly earnings increased 34% from December 2019 to December 2025.
CPI went up 30% in the same period.
Obviously that CPI covers things which went up more, and things which went up less, and your personal inflation will be different to everyone elses. Petrol prices end of Jan 2020 were 128p a litre, end of Jan 2025 they are 132p a litre [0]. Indeed petrol prices were 132p in January 2013. If you drive 40,000 miles a year you will thus see far lower inflation than someone who doesn't drive.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#97Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again. No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.
A few places will have no choice - low price elasticity, combined with things that need to actually work.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment? How do you know that ? Genuine question.
The phrasing. "It's not just X, it's Y," overuse of "quotes"
The problem with any of these tells is that an individual instance is often taken as proof on its own rather than an indicator. People do often use “it isn't X, it is Y” like constructs¹ and many, myself included sometimes, overuse “quotes”², or use m-dashes³, or are overly concerned about avoiding repeating words⁶, and so forth.
LLMs do these things because they are in the training data, which means that people do these things too.
It is sometimes difficult to not sound like an LLM-written or LLM-reworded comment… I've been called a bot a few times despite never using LLMs for writing English⁴.
--------
[1] particularly vapid space-filler articles/comments or those using whataboutism style redirection, which might be a significant chunk of model training data because of how many of them are out there.
[2] I overuse footnotes as well, which is apparently a smell in the output of some generative tools.
[3] A lot of pre-LLM style-checking tools would recommend this in place of hyphens, and some automated reformatters would make the change without access, so there are going to be many examples in training data.
[4] I think there is one at work in VS which I use in DayJob, when it is suggesting code completion options to save typing (literally Glorified Predictive Text) and I sometimes accept its suggestion, and some of the tools I use to check my Spanish⁵ may be LLM based, so I can't claim that I don't use them at all.
[5] I'm just learning, so automatic translators are useful to check what I'm written isn't gibberish. For anyone else doing the same: make sure you research any suggested changes preferably using pre-2023 sources, because the output of these tools can be quite wrong as you can see when translating into a language you are fluent in.
[6] Another common “LLM tell” because they often have weighting functions especially designed to avoid token repetition, largely to avoid getting stuck in loops, but many pre-LLM grammar checking tools will pick people up on repeated word use too, and people tend to fix the direct symptom with a thesaurus rather than improving the sentence structure overall.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.
You’re going to find what, ways to make hand crafted survival RAM and drives in your backyard chip foundry? Call me cynical if you like, but I don’t see this optimism that assumes the banal idea that somehow good always wins, when that’s simply not possible and in fact bad-guys have won many times before, it’s just that “dead men tell no tales” and the winners control what you think is reality.
The Chinese have end-to-end production capacity for lower capacity, lower performance/reliability consumer HDDs, so these are quite safe. Maybe we'll even see enterprise architectures where that cheap bottom-of-the-barrel stuff is used as opportunistic nearline storage, and then you have a far lower volume of traditional enterprise drives providing a "single source of truth" where needed.
Re: WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
Yup, when you can’t trust partners (or even nominal allies), what else is there but isolationism?
cooperation.
Sure you have to isolate certain rogue states - North Korea, Russia, USA. Always the way.