28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
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.
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…
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.
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 :
- 1080p ~15k seeds
- 720p ~3k seeds
- 480p ~0.2 seeds
… 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.
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)
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.
I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.
Yeah because nobody does IT innovation anymore. It’s all been put toward enshitification.
the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.
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?
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.
And bow down to the subscription economy.
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.
Fuck, I thought HDDs were spared cause of their low speed.
They still have controllers with chips.
Companies usually use HDDs because they last longer and are cheaper
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
Fuck ai
Dude from NVIDIA: “please stop talking bad about AI. It’s hurting my feelings.”
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, of they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing in in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
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!
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
The tools which make 1 tb HDDs also make bigger ones.
All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.
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
We will never be able to replace our old thinkpads
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.
- want to make a server
- RAM and HDD prices spike
Fuck this
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!
Proxmox cluster and shuck externals I started during the 2008 crash this is how I’d do budget HL
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)
It still cost a lot compared to this summer :/
DDR4 RDIMM is like 4 times what it was this summer so even that won’t save you.
Goddamnit. First ram now this? I’m never making my nas
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.
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.
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.
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.
My consciousness is on the cloud now, please speak for yourself!
Neo, wake up!
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.
