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Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage
- mock-possum 1y ago> delivery times for enterprise-grade HDDs delayed by two years. I sleep > so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders … This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide Real shit
- BoredPositron 1y agoThe funniest thing about this is that, with high GPU prices, rising RAM costs, and now increasing SSD prices, Apple will end up producing the most affordable PCs.
- ipsum2 1y agoApple uses the same RAM, SSD, etc as everyone else does. They don't have a magic supply chain that is unaffected by the broader world.
- BoredPositron 1y agoThey don't use the same SSDs? They don't use the same RAM? They have their own supply chain in place? Whatcha talking about bud?
- Incipient 1y agoThey use the same suppliers. The problem is the base chip, and also the wafer itself, all of which will impact apple. (apple doesn't use hdds so not talking about that here).
- BoredPositron 1y agoThe problem is not chip supply it's manufacturing. Apple has their own manufacturing suppply. This is not the chip crisis of the last years. Hyper scalers are switching to consumer hardware because there is nothing in storage for Prosumer anymore and the manufacturing pipelines for these are smaller and harder to scale than consumer ones.
- appointment 1y agoAppple uses custom DRAM and NAND chips?
- jeroenhd 1y agoThe NAND itself seems to come from companies like SK Hynix, which are currently struggling to meet demand. Apple doesn't make their own NAND, just like they don't make their own screens. They did write their own NAND controller and stuck it into their CPUs, but the flash memory that actually stores data doesn't come directly from their factories.
- BoredPositron 1y agoIt's not a fucking nand problem. The producers reduced capacity because of the slow consumer PC market in 2024. With hyperscalers shifting to consumer products the market is strained but everyone is scaling up their production now. This is not the same as the chip shortage we had in the last few years. The production capabilities are there they are just adjusting to new market realities. We will see a whiplash for a few months but we can and will produce enough chips for everyone which we were not able to do in the 20-22 crisis. Stop getting your "insights" from influencers and stop parroting them.
- Incipient 1y agoIt's ABSOLUTELY a chip shortage. TSMC is booked out years in advance and jacking prices because they can. On the dram side, because that's what I saw recently, sk hynix is down to TWO WEEKS of inventory: https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-ddr5-inventory-down-to-just-2-weeks/ https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-ddr5-inventory-down-to-just-2-... I'd be curious what evidence there is to support its purely an end-product manufacturing shortage?
- siva7 1y agoThey have a magic supply chain that is unaffected by the broader world which is one of the reasons why Tim Apple was chosen by Steve Jobs as his successor.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jrvarela56 1y agoIf every other PC is more expensive, they will just increase prices.
- HackerNewt-doms 1y agoNo, Apple has effectively promoted iCloud as the alternative to local storage as part of its product differentiation strategy in the lower price segment. Apple will almost certainly introduce the same approach for the budget MacBook as well.
- margalabargala 1y agoThis is a long term good thing. It sucks right now and will probably suck through 2027. By 2028 or so we'll have a 50% drop in price-per-storage for these components.
- andy_ppp 1y agoWill the AI bubble last until 2028? I’m still unclear how AI will return even 10% of this investment in profit.
- citrin_ru 1y agoDepending on the future you predict 10% may be a good ROI - if AI will replace humans and traditional economy will collapse all other investments will loos value even more. In such scenario you cannot save the money you only can loose less if you will make a right investment.
- adrianN 1y agoI'm not sure I understand why the economy would collapse if AI replaced humans. Wouldn't the companies just make more profit because they save labor costs and stonks go up?
- netdevphoenix 1y agoThe economy is a macrosystem. For a company to make profit, someone needs to buy. For someone to buy a service or a product, they need to have the money needed to buy. If AI replaces humans and UBI doesn't happen, costs might drop to near zero but so will revenue as virtually no one will be able to buy anything. So the economy will certainly collapse.
- adrianN 1y agoIt depends on how many jobs AI replaces and which. It is unlikely that LLMs will replaces plumbers any time soon for example. Many technological inventions have replaced humans in lots of jobs, the economy has only grown since then.
- karlkloss 1y agoAnd when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market. Save your money now and be prepared.
- esseph 1y agoIf this bubble pops you might need that money for food when bananas go from $1.50 to $150.00
- Nux 1y agoGPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.
- HugoTea 1y agoDepends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.
- pmontra 1y agoHDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts. There is also encryption at rest.
- teeray 1y ago> HDD can be written multiple times with random data Which costs more in compute than simply throwing the drive in a shredder
- walterbell 1y agoWhat's the disposal method for shredded drives?
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- krackers 1y ago>Picking QLC over TLC allows them to maintain costs while achieving sufficient endurance for cold storage. How does that work, doesn't QLC have less write endurance?
- ycombinete 1y agoYes, but QLC has much higher density. I think it's the higher density that makes it better for cold storage, which generally has infrequent access, and more reads than writes. Hence the QLC's endurance being "sufficient for cold storage".
- esseph 1y agoCold storage normally doesn't have frequent writes or frequent reads.
- Havoc 1y agoSsd for cold storage seems like an odd choice in itself. If that’s genuinely done due to availability then we really are in for a wild ride
- bayindirh 1y agoI believe "cold storage" in this parlance is more like "read-oriented" rather than being accessed once in three years.
- bayindirh 1y agoIn short: Aggressive overprovisioning. Enterprise SSDs are not expensive only because they have better flash chips, but they have much more of them. A top of the line write oriented SSD comes with 4-7x more capacity than what it says on the tin, but that extra capacity is used for cell replacement rather than capacity itself. Mixed use comes with 2-4x overprovisioning, and read oriented is around 2x IIRC.
- aaronax 1y agoI find these numbers to be way outside of what I have heard of. I would be surprised if you could give an example that comes with even 1.5x capacity. (4TB capacity, 6TB actual flash on chips, for example.)
- mrandish 1y agoI really hope the AI bubble bursts sooner rather than later. Sooner will impact the broad economy less severely (although it'll still be pretty bad) and curtail these supply chain shortages. If the bubble keeps inflating, the storage makers will have already mostly built out excess capacity and the crash will lead to even longer-term supply distortion.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI think it's still going to be a while. Go talk to anyone who isn't really tech savvy and you still hear all the same hype, now more than ever. None of them can tell you how they've actually used it to create much, if any value, but they still think it's the second coming of Christ.
- riffraff 1y agoI disagree, I think there's a huge bubble but I know at least 4 people using LLMs daily who are not techies, and I know what they use it for and it's valuable. But none of them is paying for it.
- walterbell 1y ago"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423 https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423 Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture. Micron has a new US fab coming online in 2027, which should improve supply. DRAM price fixing scandal: 1998-2002, 2016-2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
- acd10j 1y agoIt’s a cartel just like the OPEC oil cartel.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoIs there anything that isn't functionally a cartel at this point?
- Pet_Ant 1y agoYes, anywhere there is a race to the bottom. That is why you see cartels rise up, like unions are cartels. Things that are not cartels generally have ever diminishing margins.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoI see the rising of cartels more just the inevitable consequence of market systems where some players just getting bigger and bigger. Then when only a few large players are left, they collude (either openly, or just by unspoken agreement). So less of a race to the bottom, but a race to the top.
- mchannon 1y agoDuring 1998-2000, AOL was ordering so many free trial CDs that it locked up world production, and music CDs faced 8-12 week delays. It was rumored that certain weeks there were no albums getting fabricated at all, worldwide. I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.
- PeaceTed 1y agoAll that manufacturing demand led to enough free machinery to get those free Ubunutu CD's! ;)
- cmckn 1y agoMan, I loved those. A Kubuntu CD felt like such a treat to 10 year old me.
- jazzyjackson 1y agoThat's somehow unsurprising given how many AOL CDs I saw at checkout of every grocery store
- dredmorbius 1y agoStacks of them at a local post office back in the day. Covering every horizontal surface.
- rsync 1y agoIt's rough out there and has become increasingly difficult to maintain our pace of storage deployment. Further - and most concerning - is the pollution of the supply chain with refurbished/recertified stock being sold and marketed as "new". One example: https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/ https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/ I strongly advise buyers to stick with trusted suppliers, avoid Amazon/ebay channels, and carefully vet your incoming stock with SMART tools to ensure you receive what you think you are ... especially for SSD parts.
- kkylin 1y agoQuestion for all of you more knowledgeble than I: can SMART data be tampered with? When I get, say, a refurbished Mac from Apple, I'm trusting Apple won't stoop to that. But a SSD vendor I've never heard of?
- fny 1y agoYes, it can be tampered with. Drives can even lie about the amount of storage they support. I once bought a 1TB pen drive that was only 32MB for $10. (Yes, I knew it was a scam beforehand.)
- goopypoop 1y agobetter than 10 floppies!
- rsync 1y agoYes. There are vendor-specific utilities that have escaped into the wild that allow bad actors to reset various SMART counters, etc. A lot of abuse came to light during the launch and initial mining of the (ridiculous) Chiacoin[1] during which Chia miners would burn through SSDs to within a hair of their usable life, reset their SMART stats, and sell them as new on Amazon or ebay. As can be seen in my above comment, larger distributors like "Maestro Technologies" have their stock polluted with parts like this and I find it very unlikely that they are not aware of the status of these parts they are selling as new. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_Network
- evanjrowley 1y agoThe future of AI is everything we liked getting ruined by AI.
- criemen 1y agoSo far, due to the AI boom, we're lacking: * HDDs * SSDs * DRAM * GPUs, obviously * Power to hook up to our datacenters Anything I'm missing? What a crazy world we're living in.
- magicmicah85 1y agoWater? Clean Air? ROI?
- captainkrtek 1y agoNearly nothing left unexploited in the pursuit of profits.
- SlavikCA 1y agoAnd there is no profit, too.
- captainkrtek 1y agoIts very depressing that we’re almost quite literally converting money into BTUs via GPUs and not even making a buck, meanwhile the ocean gets hotter
- rpcope1 1y agoI've been saying roughly the same thing about cryptocurrencies (just a good way to waste fuckhuge amounts of resources on digital tulips to enable crime) but it never seems to stop anyone from plowing ahead on being stupid.
- lisbbb 1y agoThis is precisely what soured me on crypto. It's a ridiculous waste, a circle jerk.
- port11 1y agoWe finally reached critical mass on seeing money as an arbitrary construct, so now we're converting it into real, physics-based heat. Entropy at its finest.
- ls612 1y agoThank god I built my NAS in early October it seems like I got the proverbial last train out of town.
- rwyinuse 1y agoSame here, though I did it a bit earlier. Data center SSD's I bought a while back for 50 euros each from Ebay now sell for over 200 euros. Similar increase for HDD's too. Maybe in 3-5 years there will be a fantastic time to upgrade again, after AI bubble has burst and slightly used stuff gets dumped from data centers to online marketplaces.
- doublerabbit 1y agoSame. Wish I bought 2x 12TB drives now rather than 2x8TB.
- ls612 1y agoI bought 3x22TB WD Red Pros to put into a RaidZ1 vdev so I'll be good for a while. I have a clear upgrade path all the way up to 8 drives with 2x vdevs in a pool but that is something for far future me to consider.
- zkmon 1y agoThis is getting out of control. Like a monster eating off all the things that are needed for normal people. Worse than nukes race, which at least did not affect common man. No one really gains anything. All gains are temporary competitive edge, that vanishes quickly while locking everyone into the vicious cycle.
- fajitaforce5 1y agoMaybe when the bubble bursts there will be lots of good used hardware at massive discounts?
- criemen 1y agoBut why? Training hardware maybe will appear, but everything that's running inference has real, paying customers on it, with current capabilities level. Even if the bubble bursts, why would that demand evaporate? People still would want to use chatgpt, claude code etc., even if they stop getting any better tomorrow.
- krior 1y agoBut maybe not for the price it actually takes to run these models. Afaik atm they are all subsidized.
- criemen 1y agoI'd expect at least API pricing for all major players to be margin-positive. Positive ROI if you include model training cost? Maybe not, but in a hypothetical scenario where all capital for new model training goes away, the latest frontier model weights still continue to exist. Subscription prices for claude code et. al? No idea.
- Kuinox 1y agoNo, that's a rumor lots of people have been taking at face value. If you do the math, inferrence is very lucrative. Here someone deployed a big model, the costs are $0.20/1M token https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/ https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-05-05-large-scale-ep/
- whynotmaybe 1y agoHunger sharpens ingenuity. Soon we'll see many "AI" product that analyses network storage to identify files that could be deleted because they're the nth copy of some random report that was never published.
- walterbell 1y agoCloud storage and on-prem storage vendors have long provided deterministic block-level dedupe via hashing, without expensive LLM content analysis.
- mschuster91 1y agoSo, it's Chia all over again? [1] Sometimes, I think government supply control isn't that much of a bad thing. That way, the government could force the availability of goods for the common market as well and not just for the really big dogs flush with ample VC money to burn who can pay any price. [1] For the uninitiated: a cryptocurrency where the limiting factor wasn't CPU, RAM or GPU compute resource, but storage - in 2021, there was so much craze around it that HDD and SSD prices exploded, and after the bubble collapsed a lot of heavily abused drives flooded the markets.
- LTL_FTC 1y agoChia was/is WORM (write once , read many) so not sure how these drives were heavily abused? As a storage nerd, I bought many 18tb drives for chia and they are still spinning just fine in my storage arrays. It’s been five years.
- mschuster91 1y agoHonestly no idea, all I 'member is reporting from back in ye olde days [1]. Damn, time really flies. [1] https://www.techpowerup.com/281979/chia-farming-already-causing-ssds-to-fail-at-scale-storage-device-shortages-on-the-horizon https://www.techpowerup.com/281979/chia-farming-already-caus...
- Neywiny 1y agoI just got 2 16TB drives for $90 each off Craigslist. Perfect for video game storage or downloading huge AI models or whatever. Or legit Linux ISOs. Wish I got more but I was too late. Can't find anything close to that price online
- jdprgm 1y ago$5 a TB is insanely cheap and someone just getting rid of stuff and not really caring about the price. Nothing has ever been that cheap at retail or manufacturer recertified. Lowest was like $9-10 last year and now we are sitting at more like $15.
- Neywiny 1y agoYeah it was interesting because the guy knew what he was doing unlike other great deals I've had. I guess he just really didn't want them
- brailsafe 1y ago... might wanna zero those drives just in case
- Neywiny 1y agoThey came uninitialized, but yeah it could be worthwhile to actually zero and fully format them. They are decently fast at 275 MB/s but even that's 16 hours to do one pass. Maybe let it run over the weekend
- brailsafe 1y ago16 hours isn't that bad. I recently had to zero my old 2tb Time Capsule and just let it run overnight and during work, wasn't so bad. You'd also get to detect bad sectors, figure out how good the drive is in terms of what % of the drive is actually usable for large sequential writes
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dboreham 1y agoI've been in the industry since 1985. There have always been boom and bust cycles with the basic components. It's the nature of the thing: very costly factories that take many years to bring online. Plus normal business cycles that tend to align with the US election cycle.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoI built a computer December 2024 with a Ryzen 9900X, 64GB DDR5, 1TB + 4TB SSDs, 4060. If I were to buy the exact same parts now, nearly 1 year later, it would cost about $1,000 more for the exact same components. The memory alone went from $189 to $505. I'm not sure how much of that is from tariffs and how much is due to AI datacenter demand, but that is a massive increase.
- LTL_FTC 1y agoYup. Walked into a microcenter a few weeks ago and was surprised and saddened by how expensive everything has gotten.
- AxiomaticSpace 1y agoHuh, so that's why openai has been asking to use my local disk.
- nottorp 1y agoToo bad both storage and video cards will be unsafe to buy used when the bubble bursts. Maybe another round of cheap Aerons at least :)
- Night_Thastus 1y agoGreat. The Cryptocurrency hype finally died down and prices for things (except GPUs) were MOSTLY going back to normal. Now the sector has invented a new hype machine and hardware prices are all fucked again. Is this going to happen every few years? The industry hypes up some nonsense that skyrockets all the hardware prices and causes everything to be on backorder, just to dump it and go to the next one?
- PeterStuer 1y agoThis is getting ridiculous. Expect this to bust with prices crashing as soon as the combination of hype driven margin inflation and unfulfilled and easily cancelled purchasing agreements hit.