28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?
Why HDDs?
It’s a cascade effect. Memory pricing went up -> Increased price of SSD with DRAM cache -> Increased pricing of DRAM-less SSDs after demand shifted -> HDDs became significantly more cost effective again as a storage device but now the demand for them increased so price went up for them as well.
2 months ago I’ve got Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB for 235€ now that’s the price of 2TB and the 4TB is almost 400€.
I’ve got 8TB Seagate Exos 7E10 8TB for 182€ in May now it’s almost 260€.
We’re fucked…
Yeah right, if they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
The tools which make 1 tb HDDs also make bigger ones.
I work at a data center, and there are indeed big arrays of 1 tb sata HDDs. Although this isn’t for AI, our main clients are local companies and healthcare
Storage capacity for datacenters and other data-hungry business operations (think YouTube scale).
Current alternatives don’t reach the same capacity per dollar without caveats (magnetic tape has an incredibly slow seek time and SSDs are too expensive for non-cache usage).
Of course, AI data harvesting is essentially creating artificial (sorry) demand for even more data capacity, and it doesn’t make rational sense for them to use other forms of hardware.
Fun fact - the scale of data involved is so great that Google famously used “sneakernets” (give an employee a backpack of hard drives and tell them to go from A to B) over traditional internet or intranet connections between their larger facilities in the 2010s, because it was faster.
The data used to create that image of the black hole had a transfer speed of 14GB/s because ~700TB of it was captured in Antarctica and spent 14 hours traveling by plane
All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.
We’ve taken all the blame and put it on AI like it’s acting independently and appeared out of nowhere. This is global collusion to fuck the customers everywhere. It’s people doing this.
Bought a 12 TB data center drive that had 3 years of spin time on it for $94 August '24. When I check the eBay listing now I see it’s $220 😵
It keeps feeling like this bubble won’t pop and we’ll just keep riding upwards like the housing market
I don’t think this is sustainable because it seems like a closed loop that eventually stops making money without any new inputs.
People NEED housing, they don’t really need computer components.
My consciousness is on the cloud now, please speak for yourself!
When the bubble bursts, used computer components are going to be real cheap. Even just a few liquidated data centers will provide a ton of used supply. Even if they don’t part them up, that is still a bunch of supply that won’t be drawing on new supply.
Though that supply will be a bit annoying.
Oh look, super expensive GPUs… In an HGX board that is useless for even connecting to a PC, let alone have graphics.
Memory modules, but they are HBM or otherwise soldered to a Grace board…
SSDs, but EDSFF… Guess at least a cage for this could be some for home usage.
HDDs, but SAS. Not too or of reach for home builds, but still not as likely to just plug into home gear as SATA.
They will probably smash it all up and send it out as e-waste.
Or they will salvage what they can and sell it
Just in time for me to want to upgrade the home server storage.
I guess I’m gonna have to salvage old hard drives and deal with the tiny space.
I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more… 😭
Just finished ripping about 150 of our DVD collection and space was filling up, went looking for HDDs and was surprised at the prices. Now I know why.
I have an invention that… well, you be the judge; What if we take some cheap paper… and put holes in it ? If we place the holes in a certain way, they will resemble digits and we could store information via holes in a paper ‘card’ !!
No more ram/storage problems! …oh, and very organic btw !!
Hm, we probably need a family member to do the punching/reading of holes, but doable.
Whaddoyuthink - is it a killer invention or what ?
I’d like to see a single movie stored on punch cards. It would be massive.
Not to mention the time it would take to ingest that data
POP ALREADY!
They’re not the victims… WE ARE. They’re giving in to the tech bros idiocy and catering to their wishes. If they any ounce of dignity as a honorable brand, none of them would have risen their prices. There’s literally ZERO actual reason for them to do this other than tech bros rigging it against the rest of us.
Phew! I just bought three 16TB drives a couple of months ago for my jellyfin setup.
Selling them for $5000 each if anyone is interested.
Do we dare ask why you need 48TB to store media, or do we slowly back out of the room, avoiding eye contact?
Redundancy and high quality backups maybe? Some people have hoarded a lot of media over how many years, doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.
You had me at horded.
You. Had. Me. At. Horded.
If it was my setup those three drives would just give you 16TB of space. Two drives in a mirror and the third as a hot spare.
I get 4k/8k quality everything if I can. Plus my fam can queue up downloads. I had 32TB but we’ve filled it up in 18 months. I now have a backup of the stuff I really like and a bit of room to grow. They keep downloading long running series one of them got project model or something, some food shows and a tattoo show.
We are spiraling towards a you own nothing and rent/subscription it all society.
Honestly. Tankie as hell to say this, but thank fuck for China providing cheap easy alternatives to mainstream hardware
So computer parts are just the new toilet paper then…
Speaking of toilet paper, if they burn it can can use the heat to boil water and generate electricity. Since they use everything they can get their hands on to generate electricity it might soon be a new tp crisis.
Fuck, I thought HDDs were spared cause of their low speed.
They still have controllers with chips.
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
We will never be able to replace our old thinkpads
It’s been a while since I bought storage. $500 for 24TB seems like a steal to me. Not that I have any need for 24TB. Also, I don’t trust Seagate drives. I’d rather have four, 6TB drives than one 24TB drive, but that’s just experience talking–I’ve lost several drives over the years, and most of them were Seagate. YMMV.
Less than a year ago 279 was a baseline price for 24tb
Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.
Yes it does. Where do you think they store those gigantic training datasets?
Because the opposite is true. AI uses spinning rust far, far more than it does solid state storage.
My best guess is they want to use the raw materials on more profitable products. Kinda like how consumer PSUs are going up in price. The materials are being used for enterprise PSUs in the datacenter
