6 ms·

Something is starting to go really wrong in HDD pricing, following GPUs and other things, because I bought that same 8TB drive two years ago for $147. Hard dri

Something is starting to go really wrong in HDD pricing, following GPUs and other things, because I bought that same 8TB drive two years ago for $147. Hard drive prices are supposed to decrease in $ per TB over a multi year period, with advances in areal density.

tmabraham 6y ago
overall electronics supply chain issues, and I heard something about cryptocurrency mining also being involved with supply issues for hard drives.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  Yep. Chia coin has made many of these hard drives get purchased.
sneak 6y ago
There are currently supply chain issues in many different markets that will hopefully mostly resolve by the end of this year.
lamontcg 6y ago
The "proof of space" Chia cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
  - kylegordon 6y ago
    https://pkt.cash/ https://pkt.cash/
  - bserge 6y ago
    Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form. If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value? That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me. On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot. Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
    - someguyorother 6y ago
      > Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block. That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with. Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain. >Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it? Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
      - alpaca128 6y ago
        > Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - bufferoverflow 6y ago
      You spending time on social media or driving or eating does destroy the nature too, but you somehow justify it to yourself.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    Ironically I was speculating the other day if not this whole peer review thing would be a good candidate for a crypto currency Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market Proof of impact prediction?
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      Just what we need... more incentives for scientists to game the system.
      - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
        Ideally the scientists would be left out. Leaving the gaming as such to the reviewers. But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
    - Griffinsauce 6y ago
      The problem is that it could be a self repairing system though right? Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc. You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
  - marvin 6y ago
    Is it possible to create a «proof of pain» cryptocurrency, where holders repratedly stab themselves with sharp objects to increase their cryptocurrency balance?
    - shard 6y ago
      Sounds like the perfect scenario for the creation of torture farms.
      - marvin 6y ago
        That would be the unstated subtext. Maybe I should write a whitepaper.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    > I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth". As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent. You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs. In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.
CheezeIt 6y ago
I’ll add, the 14TB WD externals disappeared off the shelves at the local Best Buy in the past month. The data hoarding subreddit was calling those the best price per TB. There were some $140 listings for an 8TB drive on Amazon a week or two ago, but now they’re $165 and out of stock. I think crypto and hoarding are the reasons; of course inflation is a multiplier.

tmabraham 6y ago

overall electronics supply chain issues, and I heard something about cryptocurrency mining also being involved with supply issues for hard drives.

IncRnd 6y ago
Yep. Chia coin has made many of these hard drives get purchased.

sneak 6y ago

There are currently supply chain issues in many different markets that will hopefully mostly resolve by the end of this year.

lamontcg 6y ago

The "proof of space" Chia cryptocurrency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27009843

alpaca128 6y ago
I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth".
- kylegordon 6y ago
  https://pkt.cash/ https://pkt.cash/
- bserge 6y ago
  Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Buy it now, it definitely won't last forever! :D Bu seriously, I still don't understand cryptocurrencies. So, your X discoin is worth Y million real money. But that's only while it's in cryptocurrency form. If people start cashing out, the value will plummet, right? Only the first few will get close to the high value? That seems very similar to a pyramid/ponzi scheme to me. On that note, would it survive some catastrophic event? Like the Internet going down. A bunch of gold will. Hell, invest in power generators and batteries, those will survive and be worth a lot. Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it?
  - someguyorother 6y ago
    > Add them all together for the ultimate, proof of destruction: cryptocurrency backed by atmospheric pollution, fauna and flora extinction and natural resource exhaustion. Make a DoomCoin! It would keep 12 difficulty counters, one for each proof of whatever, and getting farthest ahead in one of them lets you mine a new block. That way it can distort the prices of (sorry, "effectively allocate") CPUs, GPUs, disks, ASICs, RAM... anything else you can come up with. Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain. >Can Bitcoin be restored and restarted from one computer with the whole ledger stored on it? Yes, but it may be very slow the first period, as it would be used to the pre-collapse difficulty level.
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      > Sounds like a good project for a comic book villain Or a little story in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, describing how a civilization collapsed, not with weapons but by binding all their resources in a recursive speculative bubble.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    You spending time on social media or driving or eating does destroy the nature too, but you somehow justify it to yourself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  Ironically I was speculating the other day if not this whole peer review thing would be a good candidate for a crypto currency Some mechanism by which to speculate on the impact or future credibility of a paper would create some kind of prediction market Proof of impact prediction?
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    Just what we need... more incentives for scientists to game the system.
    - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
      Ideally the scientists would be left out. Leaving the gaming as such to the reviewers. But yeah, there is probably lots of interesting ways such a system would fail.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > I'm starting to wonder what'll occur first: the bubble popping or the whole hardware market coming to a standstill because of 16 different "proof of xyz" schemes. In all seriousness, I'm expecting the former. With current trends, the Chia currency is going to be "farming" so much storage that reward per TB will drop below the breakeven point for computing more "plots" to farm, or for even keeping existing "plots" online and taking up storage. It's just a bit hard to predict where that point is since Chia itself is just getting started and has yet to be extensively traded.
  - Griffinsauce 6y ago
    The problem is that it could be a self repairing system though right? Prices go up => bubble pops => prices make next bubble viable.. etc. You'd hope rational critical thought would stop the second cycle but even a charitable reading would say so far crypto has shown there are plenty of people not applying it. (and an uncharitable one would say it's the reason it exists at all... but lets skip that discussion for once).
- marvin 6y ago
  Is it possible to create a «proof of pain» cryptocurrency, where holders repratedly stab themselves with sharp objects to increase their cryptocurrency balance?
  - shard 6y ago
    Sounds like the perfect scenario for the creation of torture farms.
    - marvin 6y ago
      That would be the unstated subtext. Maybe I should write a whitepaper.
- walrus01 6y ago
  > I cannot wait for internet connections to become unusable after a currency introduces "proof of bandwidth". As an ISP I can say that any software that caused a large percentage of our customers to max out their downstream and upstream connections 24x7 would be cracked down on hard. ISP economics, and the reason your residential last mile service might cost $65 a month and not $400, is based on oversubscription. IF you look at a traffic chart for each customer in from a random selection of 50 homes, it's very bursty and intermittent. You can put a lot of individual 1GbE symmetric FTTH customers on a 10Gbps uplink, because the likelihood they'll be trying to run a speed test or all transfer huge things simultaneously is low. 'proof of bandwidth' would very quickly require people to start doing their thing from 1U servers in colocation on dedicated hosting 1GbE services, which will cost at least 6-8x what a residential last mile service costs. In general as a residential ISP the number of customers who decide to leave a system seeding many 70GB 2160p h265 torrents of movies is quite low, and small enough to not need to bother the customers about. Not many people try to do the same thing as running a hosting facility out of their bedroom closet. Less than a few percent.

CheezeIt 6y ago

I’ll add, the 14TB WD externals disappeared off the shelves at the local Best Buy in the past month. The data hoarding subreddit was calling those the best price per TB. There were some $140 listings for an 8TB drive on Amazon a week or two ago, but now they’re $165 and out of stock. I think crypto and hoarding are the reasons; of course inflation is a multiplier.