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€.
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
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.