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WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
- moomoo11 9mo agoFuture show HN: how I managed to parallelize 100 tape drives to load windows and play video games
- blackhaz 9mo agoVHS cassettes: maybe not so obsolete, after all? Also, the Return of PKZIP.
- baal80spam 9mo agoStacker and Doublespace!
- boobsbr 9mo agomemmaker and qemm
- Keyframe 9mo agoVideo Backup System for Amiga!
- nubinetwork 9mo agoYou could do worse... https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8 https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8
- bravetraveler 9mo ago/dev/null as a service, mooning
- lpcvoid 9mo agoBut hey, we get slop videos of the pope doing something funny, that's just as cool as being able to purchase computer hardware, right?
- littlecranky67 9mo agoTo be fair, heise is a german news site, and the very article is auto-translated by AI from its german counterpart.
- lpcvoid 9mo agoAI use for translation is a good fit for the tech. The problem is generative AI.
- archagon 9mo agoUhm, kind of, if you don't mind random stuff getting inserted into your translation sometimes. (Source: this has actually happened to me.)
- kasabali 9mo agoMachine translation have become pretty good long before AI hype started.
- IshKebab 9mo agoNot really.
- kasabali 9mo agoReally. Source: I've been using Chrome's built in translation heavily since around 2018-19, and not before that only because that's the time I've realized it'd became god damn good.
- IshKebab 9mo agoGPT-2 was in 2019. That was really the start of the LLM bandwagon. You could argue it was ChatGPT that brought it to the masses, but that was still only in 2022. 3 years is not a long time.
- fnands 9mo agoDamn. First GPUs, then RAM, now hard drives? What's next, the great CPU shortage of 2026?
- geolqued 9mo agoyes https://www.reuters.com/world/china/intel-amd-notify-customers-china-lengthy-waits-cpus-2026-02-06/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/intel-amd-notify-custome...
- fnands 9mo agoOh no, looks like my 8700k will have to hold out a little longer.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bilekas 9mo agoBetter start hoarding Silica.
- loeg 9mo agoI think hard drives was before RAM but it kind of all happened contemporaneously.
- Fervicus 9mo agoWhat's next is no custom built PCs. They want us running dumb thin clients and subscribing to compute. Or it will be like phones. We'll get pre-built PCs that we aren't allowed to repair and they'll be forced to be obsolete every few years.
- squeefers 9mo ago"they"? i see companies jacking their prices up, plain and simple. and us idiots still pay. ask yourself does intel no longer wish to sell CPUs to consumers? doesnt sound reasonable that intel would want to decimate their main market so AI companies can rule the world for some reason
- lccerina 9mo agoEveryone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH! The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.
- stingraycharles 9mo agoI’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid. If it’s temporary I can live with it. I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.
- FrankBooth 9mo agoWe useless eaters are to be priced out of life soon enough.
- dgxyz 9mo agoTraditionally that hasn't gone well for the rich folk.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 9mo agoIt also hasn't gone well for the non-rich folk either.
- brador 9mo agoTruer than even you dare to admit. How many useless living humans do you know? They go somewhere. Something happens to them. Whatever it is it’s about to happen to 30% of the population. What’s the opposite of survivor bias?
- malfist 9mo agoIt takes a profound lack of empathy to refer to your neighbors as "useless living humans"
- icf80 9mo agothey’re pushing for AI, but nobody will have a device to use it?
- FMecha 9mo agoI feel traditional "rust" hard disks would be inefficient for AI use. Unless they include SSDs (which I feel these data centers are more likely to be using) in the definition as well...
- foxrider 9mo agoThey need it hoard datasets.
- stockresearcher 9mo agoIn a large rack-mount SAN with hundreds or thousands of disks connected to your computing equipment via fiberchannel, the performance difference is pretty negligible. The real advantage of SSDs in this use case is storage density and power efficiency. On the other hand, your compute resources might be packed in so tight with power-intensive stuff that you appreciate the spinning rust “wasting” space.
- Havoc 9mo agoChromebook with a 64gig shitty eMMC is what Google and friends would love you to use. Pay that cloud drive subscription!
- 112233 9mo agoThe TV is best device for unleashing your creativity by upvoting your favourite Sora creators! Become an expert at any field by activating premium prompts from our partners! By connecting camera you can have meaningful motivating discussions with your deceased loved ones (camera required for fraud prevention. Remember, not looking at the screen during ads is punishable by law) You have 31/999 credits remaining. What activity would you like to productively participate in today?
- embedding-shape 9mo agoI'll go against the grain and claim this might be a good thing long term. Yes, it sucks also, I was planning to expand my NAS but guess I'll figure out how to compress stuff instead. Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now figure out a different solution to recover space, I'm hoping with a shortage this kind of thing will be more widespread, and we'll end up with smaller things until the shortage is over. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" or however it goes.
- altmanaltman 9mo agoThink that's more of a "silver lining" instead of the overall trend being a "good thing long term." It's still pretty terrible.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoYeah, true, that's more aligned with what I was thinking and more accurate. Thanks :)
- 63stack 9mo agoThere is an increasing chance the "invention" will be that nobody owns personal computers, and now has to rent from the cloud.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoIf anything the ecosystem is moving away from that, not into that. People seem more and more averse of relying on SaaS when local applications can do, but this might also be somewhat of a bubble I'm perceiving, rather than a global trend I suppose.
- fnands 9mo agoFirst they came for the GPUs, but I did not speak out, for I was not a gamer. Then they came for the RAM, but I did not speak out, for I had already closed Firefox. Then they came for the hard drives, but I did not speak out, for I had the cloud. Then my NAS died, and there was no drive left to restore from backup.
- post-it 9mo agoIt'll be fine. The supply chain for these components is inelastic, but that means once manufacturing capacity increases, it'll stay there. We'll see lower prices, especially if there is an AI crash and a mass hardware selloff like some people are predicting.
- StopDisinfo910 9mo agoTrue if production capacity increases but it's an oligopoly and manufacturers are being very cautious because they don't want to cut into their margins. That's the problem with concentration. The market becomes ineffective for customers.
- Maxion 9mo agoIt's not about cutting in to their margins, if they end up scaling up production it will take several years and cost an untold amount of billions. When the AI bubble pops, if there's not replacement deman there's a very real chance of them going bankrupt.
- cubefox 9mo ago> According to Mosley, Seagate is not expanding its production capacities for now. Growth is to come only from higher-capacity hard drives, not from additional unit numbers.
- mrtksn 9mo agoIf it takes 2 years to increase, after 2 years everything will be thin clients already. Completely locked in, fully under control and everybody used to it. Very dystopian TBH.
- fastily 9mo agoIf component prices keep going up and the respective monopoly/duopoly/triopoly for each component colludes to keep prices high/supply constrained, then eventually devices will become too expensive for the average consumer. So what’s the game plan here? Are companies planning to let users lease a device from them? Worth noting that Sony already lets you do this with a ps5. Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation
- Maxion 9mo ago> Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation That's when I sell of my current hardware and house, buy a cow and some land somewhere in the boondocks and become a hermit.
- b3lvedere 9mo agoIt could be a level up from that. "You will use AI, because that will be the only way you will have a relaxed life. You will pay for it, own nothing and be content. Nobody cares if you are happy or not."
- StopDisinfo910 9mo agoWe could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. There has been too many mergers in the component market. You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and don't want to overcommit.
- pickleglitch 9mo ago> We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. Could we though? Even if gerrymandering and voter suppression weren't already out of control, and getting worse, there are very few politicians who could or would do anything about all this. Elections aren't going to save us.
- olavgg 9mo ago[flagged]
- nubg 9mo agoSorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bot comment? Why is this allowed on HN?
- Maxion 9mo ago> Why is this allowed on HN? 1) The comment you replied to is 1 minute old, that is fast for any system to detect weird comments 2) There's no easy and sure-fire way to detect LLM content. Here's wikipedias list of tells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
- bilekas 9mo ago> Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment? How do you know that ? Genuine question.
- f311a 9mo ago> isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out." The "isn't just .., but .." construction is so overused by LLMs.
- hakanderyal 9mo agoIt has Claude all over it. When you spend enough time with them it becomes obvious. In this case “it’s not x, it’s y” pattern and its placement is a dead giveaway.
- bayindirh 9mo agoIsn't this ironic to use AI to formulate a comment against AI vendors and hyperscalers. It's not ironic, but bitterly funny, if you ask me. Note: I'm not an AI, I'm an actual human without a Claude account.
- ta9000 9mo agoSave us, China.
- phatfish 9mo agoIt just goes to show how totally corporations have captured western aligned governments. Our governments are powerless to do anything (aside from some baby steps from the EU). China is now the only solution to fix broken western controlled markets.
- prewett 9mo agoCynicism in unhelpful, and it's not correct. This has nothing to do with governments and everything to do with market economics. This sort of thing happens every few years in computing.
- KRAKRISMOTT 9mo agoThen what's your solution? It's a capital intensive business to get into, without some regulatory changes either on the supply side or the demand side, there's no way for it to be naturally prevented without consumers bearing the brunt of the downside. Yes, the market will eventually correct itself but until then consumers suffer.
- brador 9mo agoThe only legal check for monopoly corporations is regulation/taxation. That doesn’t work cross border. Especially when the other side has nationalised and artificially props the monopoly. The solution then is removing the product from market till local competition takes its place.
- steve1977 9mo agoTime for some heavy regulation
- tjpnz 9mo agoThat's not going to happen when AI is already propping up a significant chunk of the economy. There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott but not much coordination on targets.
- squeefers 9mo ago> There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott its not being used anywhere lol where are they meant to boycott?
- newsclues 9mo agoI hope the data centres burn
- rationalist 9mo agoThen prices will definitely go up more.
- newsclues 9mo agoThen more burning data centres will occur
- rationalist 9mo agoDoesn't sound like that will help anything.
- Havoc 9mo agoSupply of 2nd hand enterprise stuff is also showing a slowdown. Seeing less of it show up in eBay
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- arjie 9mo agoI picked up a few hundred TB from a chia farm sale. Glad for it. I think I'm set for a while. Honestly, the second they started buying this stuff I started buying hardware. The only problem for me is that they're even ruining the market for RTX 6000 Pro Blackwells.
- m4rtink 9mo agoLooks like we need a computer hardware reserves the same way there are regional reserves for food, fuels and other critical commodities? And for the same reason - to avoid the dominant players going "oh shiny" on short term lucrative adventures or outright trying to manipulate the market - causing people to starve and making society grind to a halt.
- zozbot234 9mo agoThe real "computer hardware reserves" is the used market. Average folks and smaller businesses will realize that their old gear now has resale value and a lot more of it will be entering the resale/refurbishment market instead of being thrown away as e-waste.
- m4rtink 9mo agoThat is a very good point! Still, at least in the short to medium term, there are many companies, institutions and individuals that are used to getting new hardware that is under warranty - developer hardware refreshes, store hardware updates and deployments, some schools and academic institutions that provide hardware to students or even just people getting a laptop for schools use. I think people would be used to getting new hardware for all of these & might be pretty much left out cold without a machine or having to opt for a reused or resold machine without the necessary technical knowledge to support it themselves.
- cubefox 9mo agoI'm confused, that doesn't make sense to me: > They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them. What type of training data? LLMs need relatively little of that. For example, DeepSeek-V3 [1], still a relatively large model: > We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens At 2 bytes per token, that's 29.6 terabytes. That's basically nothing compared to the amount of 4K content that is uploaded to YouTube every day. 1: https://arxiv.org/html/2412.19437v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2412.19437v1
- Jach 9mo agoYou may have answered your own question if they're wanting to train models on video and other media.
- cubefox 9mo agoSo Veo (Google), Sora (OpenAI) or Seedance (ByteDance)?
- greatgib 9mo agoHonestly looks highly suspicious to me. Because ok they might need some big storage like petabits. But how can this be a match in proportion with the capacity that is currently usually needed for everything that is hard drive hungry. Any cloud service, any storage service, all the storage needed for private photo/video/media storage for everything that is produced everyday, for all consumer hardwares like computers... Gpu I understand but hard drive looks excessive. It's like if tomorrow there is a shortage of computer cabling because ai datacenter needs some.
- zozbot234 9mo agoIf you're building for future training needs and not just present, it makes more sense. Scaling laws say the more data you have, the smarter and more knowledgeable your AI model gets in the end. So that extra storage can be quite valuable.
- adornKey 9mo agoDo the guys that buy out the market have real use for all the hardware - or is it just hype? A solution against investors trying to corner the market would be to sell virtual hardware. Let them buy as much options on virtual "to be delivered" hardware" as they want. We also need an option market for virtual LLM-tokens, where the investors can put all their money without affecting real people.
- alecco 9mo agoSam Altman (just yesterday): Codex weekly users have more than tripled since the beginning of the year! https://twitter.com/sama/status/2023233085509410833 https://twitter.com/sama/status/2023233085509410833 Funny how they all meet at the "You'll own nothing" Swiss club.
- ksec 9mo agoThere hasn't been a better time in the past 15 years to push for a new video or image codec. Saving storage Space is important again. This is assuming most of what we stored are either images or video.
- croes 9mo agoNew video codecs needs hardware support for good performance means you need to buy new hardware. Not a good time for that.
- greatgib 9mo agoNo one can be surprised to see that all of these artificial "shortages" are impacting components with monopoly or few actors producers...
- zozbot234 9mo agoThat's the electronics industry in general though. The shortages are real and a normal part of growing pains for any industry that's so capital-intensive and capacity constrained.
- iamshs 9mo agoRepairability, upgradability and standards compliance needs to be minimum in consumer products. No to proprietary connectors. No soldered SSD or RAM. For home use, allow relaxed licensing options for discarded enterprise products like switches, Wifi Access Points etc. (Juniper Mist APs are fantastic, but are a brick without their cloud). Currently, I cannot put in a market bought SSD in my Macbook. I cannot put in a SSD in my Unifi router without buying their $20 SSD tray. I cannot put third party ECC-RAM and SSDs in my Synology NAS because the policy has only been lifted on HDDs but nothing else. I fear opposite will happen. Only leveraged companies have access to DRAM and NAND and hence will use it to lock us into their ecosystem as consumers won't even get access to storage in the open market otherwise.
- sireat 9mo agoAfter, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans? In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs. As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much. So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers. I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent. As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building. I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill. They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price. That is free market at work right? In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects. Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer. So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?
- zozbot234 9mo ago> As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building. We have a long way to go before the average PC costs even half as much as it did in 1989 (adjusted for inflation). And of course the performance for typical consumer use is orders of magnitude better than it was back then.
- ls612 9mo agoMy parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and no graphics acceleration at all beyond whatever was integrated on the Pentium 3. It cost $2000 back then so probably almost $4000 today. My high end 4090 rig cost a bit more than that to build for comparison and that machine is better than 98% of machines out there today.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoPreviously: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034192
- oxag3n 9mo agoIt's not clear if they are going to redistribute production lines in favor of hyper-scalers - are we going to see fewer SATA drives on the market?
- throwrg25 9mo agoNext on the data centers' menu: jet engines https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-powering-data-centers-b1c587a9 https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...
- archagon 9mo agoSomebody once commented on social media that cryptocurrency feels like a dropshipped alien technology designed to deplete a civilization's resources. Now that crypto has failed to paperclip maximize the world, maybe LLMs are attempt number two.
- joecool1029 9mo agoI already see the ‘save us China’ meme comments, but I want to go a step further and ask: Did they ever develop domestic HDD production (like of the tooling needed to make HDD’s)? As I understand it, the technology holders for this specific line of technology are Korea (Samsung), Japan (Toshiba), and US (WD/Seagate). I don’t think China ever developed the tooling internally? Am I wrong? This feels like the ballpoint pen situation. Where China could build everything but the ballpoint since it took specialized machinery. But HDD gets to be a hard sell with how far NAND has come, and China could just lean on economies of scale here and skip the hard work of what at some point could become overcomplicated abandonware technology. Similar to approach between internal combustion cars and EV’s… EDIT: And I am very aware production happens in places like Thailand, I don’t forget the flood pricing, I also don’t forget clamcoin shortages. Specifically mean where the core expertise is held.
- mung 9mo agoI guess this is the real way that AI will destroy humanity. By sucking up everything and making it expensive.
- hattmall 9mo ago[SHOW HN]: I built a self-replicating LLM that runs off of common grocery store items and alcohol.
- janlucien 9mo ago[dead]
- spirewalk 9mo agoBig tech buying up HDDs in order to force the consumer base into cloud computing and storage.