3 ms·

Flash storage costs have gone way up. I wonder if backblaze's business has seen any changes given that their assets are platter drives

dns_snek 8mo ago
Retail HDD prices have also gone up ~50% over the past couple of months.
- londons_explore 8mo ago
  Pretty sure that's cos every AI company wants to have a copy of all the worlds information stored in each of their data centers, and hard drives are the best storage medium for that. Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - trueismywork 8mo ago
    In modern storage tech, network is the i/o bottleneck, but HDD
- agumonkey 8mo ago
  Interesting, SSD have kind doubled.. storage used to be such a commodity item and now it's a gold rush
  - alex43578 8mo ago
    Same with DRAM, old-node chips during the Post-COVID chip shortage, and toilet paper during COVID. Lots of things are commodities until the demand spikes.
- KronisLV 8mo ago
  Thankfully for personal stuff there's at least the option of buying white label or recertified drives. Recently got some 1 TB ones from Datablocks as backups, did a short writeup on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablocks https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo... (though a better post made its way on HN by someone else a while ago, too) To be honest, they mostly have 8 TB and up in stock at the moment, but the price was around 35 EUR for the 1 TB drive which is kind of insane when similar drives at local stores cost 110 EUR right now - I remember when those Seagate Barracuda drives were about 40-50 EUR brand new! For the US, there's also goHardDrive, though I haven't used them myself: https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm I still use SSDs for boot drives, video games and also fragmented data (like Garage for something S3 compatible, which chunks the files), but for backups and longer term storage HDDs are great.

dns_snek 8mo ago

Retail HDD prices have also gone up ~50% over the past couple of months.

londons_explore 8mo ago
Pretty sure that's cos every AI company wants to have a copy of all the worlds information stored in each of their data centers, and hard drives are the best storage medium for that. Design your training strategy carefully and you can do streaming rather than random reads from the drives and get enough performance.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- trueismywork 8mo ago
  In modern storage tech, network is the i/o bottleneck, but HDD
agumonkey 8mo ago
Interesting, SSD have kind doubled.. storage used to be such a commodity item and now it's a gold rush
- alex43578 8mo ago
  Same with DRAM, old-node chips during the Post-COVID chip shortage, and toilet paper during COVID. Lots of things are commodities until the demand spikes.
KronisLV 8mo ago
Thankfully for personal stuff there's at least the option of buying white label or recertified drives. Recently got some 1 TB ones from Datablocks as backups, did a short writeup on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablocks https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/buying-some-drives-from-datablo... (though a better post made its way on HN by someone else a while ago, too) To be honest, they mostly have 8 TB and up in stock at the moment, but the price was around 35 EUR for the 1 TB drive which is kind of insane when similar drives at local stores cost 110 EUR right now - I remember when those Seagate Barracuda drives were about 40-50 EUR brand new! For the US, there's also goHardDrive, though I haven't used them myself: https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm https://www.goharddrive.com/category-s/69.htm I still use SSDs for boot drives, video games and also fragmented data (like Garage for something S3 compatible, which chunks the files), but for backups and longer term storage HDDs are great.