Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim
28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
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https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-percent-since-september-iconic-24tb-seagate-barracuda-now-usd500-as-ai-claims-another-victimOpen linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com701
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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…
if you are looking at this from the US that is not necessarily the only thing that could be driving prices up though. You've got tariffs and a much weaker dollar than it used to be right now...
A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.
US prices are just EU prices + sales tax now
Yeah right, if they're buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they're doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
My understanding is the large AI companies sign purchase agreements with the manufacturers for X amount of drives. The manufacturers then take whatever chips/platters and build those drives. The AI companies have signed such large agreements that all the chips and layers are going to whatever drives they're asking for and none left to make consumer drives.
They're replacing us. Until now, corporations have obviously marketed to the working class, even the poorest of us. And they put in that effort, but now they're moving past us bottom 90% of consumers and focusing on the top 10% and of course the ultra rich specifically. The top 10% of consumers already accounted for 55% of all buying power in Feb 2025, before tariffs, before the unnamed recession we're in now, before the shutdown and mass firings.
So now you can imagine what that number is at, and you can see their thought process. It's just not worth bothering to market and sell to us commoners.
Now, I think they're stupid and I think they're way too confident in something like the AI bubble, which will pop eventually. That being said, most new purchases (cars, clothes, electronics, ect...) are by the top 10%. They are gunning for our buying power and they are gunning for our labor power with AI. If they succeed, we will lose our two biggest bargaining chips. The ultra rich know this, and they hate that we have had any say over the economy.
If we're gonna do this general strike, we gotta do it soon, because they are actively working to make action like that impossible.
They are working an infinite money glitch:
What if we were our own customers? Then we could charge whatever we wanted and just use the money from our dumb investors, and since we are also the producers we make a ton of money on the sales!
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
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.
Fuck this
Proxmox cluster and shuck externals I started during the 2008 crash this is how I'd do budget HL
If it's for a homelab or small project refurbished models are still a good deal but you should hurry, my vendor is running low on hardware that was sitting for years.. I got an R630 (40 cores, 64Gb RAM) on offer a few months ago for peanuts...
I wonder what are peanuts in this context. It sounds like a great server!
honestly servers don’t need the latest hardware: just build using DDR4 (or even DDR3): it’s half the price per GB or less each step down, and honestly the biggest reason you want RAM in a server is for a ZFS cache, which is going to be bottlenecked on plenty of other things far before your RAM speed (IMO; i’ve done exactly 0 testing)
(though the max size of a DDR3 module is 8GB so on most consumer hardware that will limit you to 32GB total)
DDR4 RDIMM is like 4 times what it was this summer so even that won't save you.
It still cost a lot compared to this summer :/
I should have bought more DDR5 when I first built mine. I figured I'd be able to add more later so I just focused on a good CPU...
Billionaires are not going to give you a chance to decide whether you want a dumb thin AI client or not.
You won't be able to procure the hardware even if you could afford it.
We are all gonna be some version the brotherhood of steel now
and if you don't shut up and like it you will be cut out of the internet ... black balled by ATT/T Mobile/Verizon while they refuse to drop fiber to the curb but will end up puling the copper off the poles so no more wired internet.
NOT UNTIL they are done recording profits and laying off people constantly. until they run out of people to "fire:
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.
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
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!
Neo, wake up!
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
See? That's why Satya Nadella doesn't care about Windows. Soon nobody will be able to afford a PC anyways.
They want consumers to have cheap low-resource systems so they are forced to use the cloud for storage and processing.
Yes, all the power to do any form of large computation needs to be traceable and rented. You will own nothing, rent everything, and be happy with it.
And bow down to the subscription economy.
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.
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.
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.
I'll just note there is still a loophole: external drives have sales in the $10-11/TB range, and you can shuck the drives.
Right now $280 for 26TB, for example: https://slickdeals.net/f/19091557-26tb-seagate-expansion-desktop-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-280-free-shipping
That's apparently CMR Barracuda inside.
These may disappear completely, or may simply be drives that AI data centers do not prefer permanently, since they are not rated for 24/7 use. Fine for RAID home server use, apparently, though
I remember doing this years ago, but the only problem I remember is they were 2 hard drives instead of 1 inside split in size to lower the cost. Idk if its different now, but if you expect 1 drive at that size that could be wrong.
Did you buy an offbrand ext drive? I mainly stick to EasyStore models (and its been a minute since I had to buy), and they were always 1 internal HDD in their annoying to open enclosure
It's just one: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1mkt0vd/26tb_seagate_expansion_shucking_experience/
The size of the enclosure isn't large enough to accommodate more than one 3.5" drive.
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
POP ALREADY!
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.
Companies usually use HDDs because they last longer and are cheaper
They still have controllers with chips.
Made me buy a used 10tb drive recently.
Screw them all, I will have a place for my data and I won't pay them a dollar for these shenanigans.
I will use a book shelf sized rack of RAID hubs filled with 1 GB flash drives before I buy a single fucking KB of cloud space.
I will install an ancient version of Linux on my mackie D8B soundboard and use that as my PC before I ever buy a goddamn cloud computer.
I would love to do that, but am scared of my house getting flooded/catching fire/getting tornado-ed/multitude of other things. Also, the electricity sometimes doesn’t work, especially now in winter and I need 100% uptime for remote data access
Backups and High Availability come to mind.
If there's any other place you'd be allowed to install a second node on, ideally served by another ISP (since we talk about remote access), you can do that. This can be your friends, or family, or someone else you trust.
Just have 2 NAS devices with equal drives in each and let them work in a high availability cluster. This way, you'll have near 100% uptime and a backup in case something goes wrong.
Sure, that is more expensive, but it gives some peace of mind while keeping control of your data. Additionally, with this configuration you don't necessarily have to build a RAID array if money is a problem, so some costs can be shaved off (Though it never hurts to still have it if you can afford it)
I’ve got 30tb or so made up of 4 and 10tb used drives. All I’ll buy anymore. In fact, I need to change out of of my parity drives. Hopefully used market is still somewhat affordable.
I have four 8TB drives from last year and 4 externals from my old build that were healthy when they came off the last system.
I might be a little ragged in 10 years but I'll still have a disk spinning if they aren't arresting wireguard users for terrorism by then.
In my country I got used 10tb for $150. Don't know situation in your place.
I used to pay like $69 for them in the US. Looks like they add a hundred bucks or so to the price…
Quickly checking eBay, they now cost around $120-150 for SATA and around $100-130 for SAS in the US
Thanks, I’ll look there. I usually just go Amazon or Newegg (easy returns if bad) but I’m sure there are better deals out there.
We will never be able to replace our old thinkpads
Noooooo!!
I just dreamt last night I had 2 more 28tb hard drives for my server to backup.
Now it's a nightmare. Fuck AI!!!
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
Man, i remember paying $300 for a 200gb ATA back in the day....
My 2TB SSD (which I bought for about 100€) failed, I could get my money back but a new one is now 300€.
I got my AMD RX580 graphics card failing on me. It started to crash so frequently I had to put back my GTX1050Ti
Time to buy some sbc boards so I can actually host content in ten years, with whoever's software considering the foss devs will be broke.
Thank fuck I'm a millennial and I only have thirty more years on the disappointment machine.
If you're under 30, learn how to shoot. You won't be doing much hosting.
But what if my cannibal raider gang's members need a scalable, high availability image and video storage solution for their family albums?
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
Goddamnit. First ram now this? I'm never making my nas
Glad I picked up new NAS drives when I did. 8x 18TB Seagate Exos for $180 each. Two years later its doubled
I am so fucking jealous of you right now.
Butlerian Jihad When?
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?
relative to the hard drive market in general, that seems like a drop in the bucket. research labs like CERN write TBs per SECOND
quality data sets don’t even come close
They might write to faster storage first, then dump to slower larger storage afterwards
they might, but the point is the volume of data rather than the speed… CERN is obviously an outlier, but not by as much as you’d think. copious amounts of data is kinda par for the course in a lot of cases, and training data just doesn’t even come close to the volume of data that large data users produce (data warehouses/lakes in the order of PB and EB are not that uncommon)
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
An with my investments i really wanna cash in right now, i feel like the bubble is about to burst in the next 3-6months. Then stocks would go down by like 30% and i can buy in again.
Im almost certain its gonna crash down and i wanna be out before that happens but right now stocks just go up way to much.
Usually people advise against trying to time the market. Missing the down is one thing but if you miss the way back up then that is a lot of potential profit gone. Weathering the storm is typically the better option.
Fuck ai
Dude from NVIDIA: "please stop talking bad about AI. It's hurting my feelings."
Argh. I was hoping to upgrade my server storage later this year...
Yeah… in November I was looking at the exos to get 4 or 5 on serverpartdeals, it was around 330, but I wanted to wait until January. Well last I checked they were 430 and I decided I could wait until next year ugh
I have a NAS with four 8TB Western Digital Red drives that are getting up there in age. I have been looking for a good deal to upgrade then with higher capacity drives for the last few years. Now I’m thinking when they fail I’ll probably have to buy lower capacity drives and be more picky with what data I keep around.
Maybe I’ll look into burning Blu-rays and CDs. I’m definitely not going back to cloud storage.
Why isn't there a companies just for the consumer market?
Because if they can make for consumers, then there's a shit ton of investor money waiting for some tech bro to turn it into 'AI'.
The tech industry companies are playing with nigh unlimited house money, consumers can't compete.
Because AI is a dual use technology which can broker massive amounts of information to governments.
b/c they all fail as everyone is going for ai marketed cr*p
Damn. 2/8 drives in my array have died. I was going to replace them, but at this price point I might just delete some porn instead.
Or buy cloud storage.
Don't buy cloud storage that's what they want you to do
this is the answer.
Just upvote.
this is not the answer.
is this a question?
is it a question?
is what a question?
I'm loving the block feature on Lemmy. If you realize someone's just doing low effort spam, you don't have to read their comments any more!
I hated that part of Reddit.
IKR! last I checked I had over 300 users on my block list.
super helpful for ignoring trolls.
If two are dead, you probably should get at least one of them replaced. I'm assuming you are running a RAID 6 with zero redundancy at this point.
I'm on RAID1 on btrfs, so I just rebalance and remove the disks as they break.
O, that is a real cool feature. So you just lose space then as they fail, not redundancy.
It sure is!
In my case it's vulnerable while I re-balance.
btrfs can work with mixed-size disks and change RAID-levels on-line, too.
Glad I bought a bunch of 20 TB ones some months back. I'm good for a few years.
if 100% of the hardware goes to running data centers then we'll just get cloud computers which are really good and fun to use and we like them for $40
Nah, fuck that
I forgot this was Reddit and you have to /s or nobody knows it's a joke
I knew you were joking when I saw $40 price. $40 per minute perhaps. On top of your $100 ISP bill.
Honestly I don't think it matters so much...
I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.
Nobody needs (that's the crux term here, need, not "want" or "desire" or "wish") a bigger hard drive. It's the same way nobody needs an 8K TV and they they aren't sold. Why?
I'm glad you ask, it's all connected! If you stick to "just" a 4K TV, because you have normal human eyes, then the content you need is "just" 4K so a movie is just 2GB or so... and thus you don't need a larger hard drive, thus not CPU, GPU, memory, etc. The current setup is simply "good enough".
I can already hear the steps of that ONE person who edits 360 8K videos for National Geographic preparing to argue "actually...!" and yes, they ARE right. Some people, professionals, DO need super high res, super high framerate, super high everything ... but that's NOT your average consumer. You average consumer STOPPED upgrading because they need to. Most consumer who still upgrade mostly do it because of habit, because they get coerced into it (e.g. MicroSlop Windows 11) but not because they genuinely need to.
So... yes I "wish" I had better everything, including hard drive, but the truth is we "peaked" in terms of actually required spec a couple of years ago, same for phones that are now the same equivalent small slabs.
My point is I'm wondering if this AI bet will have deeper consequence for the industry overall with the realization for most people (again, please before you reply : your average consumer, the person who browse the Web, watch a video of a TV series, play some games for fun, NOT a professional!) that the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.
The problem with your argument is that while you can buy the lower res movie because you don't need more and if a lower res doesn't exist you can still watch the high res on your low res TV, you can't choose to buy a lower install size game or software.
When you buy those, the size it is is usually what you will have to install to use it, and if you can't buy a large enough storage to install it...
I'd be curious to know if game size is increasing over time. My intuition is that we also peaked at 200GB installs. There are bigger games but on average I'm not sure we installation size keeps on growing.
Yeah because nobody does IT innovation anymore. It's all been put toward enshitification.
Then the prices of hardware TODAY are good enough. How the fuck does it not matter that prices are skyrocketing across the board for EVERYTHING both old and new?
I'm not arguing about prices. I wish prices would keep on going down but that's just my preference as a consumer. It has nothing to do with my argument though.
Get your point but most 4K encodings I see are ~10-20GB.
Another interesting metric is piracy trends, checking a popular show, e.g Fallout and its latest episode namely S02E05 :
... and 2160p gets 50 seeds!
Of course that's just 1 datapoint and it'd have to be replicated (maybe it was released after the other versions, maybe it's a show people do NOT want in high res, etc) but it's quite a big gap.
I only grab movies in 4k anymore, and that's even reserved for those worthy of it (LotR or OG Marvel for example). I used to grab series in 4k but the size consumption is not worth it. The same goes for movies but you need to consider that one season of a series is equal to four to eight 4k movies in size depending on the episodes in the series. I used to grab 720p series for those not typically watched, but since H265 was introduced I find many releases where 1080p is similar and sometimes smaller in size to a 720p release.
It's already having deeper consequences, if their purchases affect RAM and storage prices, then it means it yields results better than half a year ago.
I agree about "good enough". I felt that "good enough" moment in year 2006. In year 2009 even more. Some people remember Amiga Workbench of year 1999 stage as "good enough".
I don't think it matters which of these is closer to the equilibrium, we'll learn empirically.
But I'm feeling better that it's having a hard power redistribution from consumer sector to datacenter sector, that's not a bad thing, because most of that consumer sector was based on the bullshit you are describing. It didn't need to, but all the potent avenues of said sector's development were strangled by RIAA, "protect the children", "there are wrong people saying wrong things in the Internet" and other such pressures. And also by Steve Jobs and his idea that you don't need ergonomics or usefulness, just a sci-fi look and a brand, I think that'll take years to rectify, even though people are slowly getting tired of the "touchscreens are the future, physical buttons are fossil" narrative.
That bullshit drain means that we'll have a better, healthier consumer sector eventually. And perhaps in 10 years or so something interesting will be happening there. Life is about change and movement.
You realise massive capacity hard drives were never meant for the average plebian, right?
They were always aimed at people with Certain Requirements and businesses. So saying that Average Joe ain't buying a 28tb hdds isn't a gotcha, it's the norm
(Meanwhile my workplace is buying them like crazy. building a new DAS)
Right, sorry maybe I got a bit excited by my point. It wasn't about this HDD example in particular, it was about the broader consumer hardware trend.
I don't know if it's just because I've grown a bit over the last 15-ish years, but a computer also seems to perform better for longer now. My 1070 I bought in 2016 (I think?) was clearly starting to lack behind with newer games after 4 years. My current 3070, which is 4 years old now, just keeps performing in new games.
Interesting, I'm not sure if there is a metric for it, maybe Steam most popular configuration could be used then see if it's average time does it indeed last longer? My intuition is it might indeed but I didn't check the actual data.
Have they actually gone up that much? Oraybe just specific models? I just bought a 12TB NAS drive on Black Friday and the price difference was less than $20 compared to when I tried to do the exact same thing the year before.
Oh wow, 500$. So what?