Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

There's clearly easy/irrational money distorting the markets here. Normally this wouldn't be a problem: prices would go up, supply would eventually increase and everybody would be okay. But with AI being massively subsidized by nation-states and investors, there's no price that is too high for these supplies.

Eventually the music will stop when the easy money runs out and we'll see how much people are truly willing to pay for AI.

The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages.

Market says the more you buy the better pricing you get. Once you start capturing large market share of the product, the price should go up and not down; exponentially.

Example, a person that owns 10 houses means that they are restricting the ability of others to own a single home. By increasing the cost of excessive product ownership ... it will reduce the amount of product that people will hoard and allow others to gain access to it.

Better stock up with used laptops. I'm going to buy another one this year. Those used ones usually don't last very long.

What if in the near future it is simply too expensive to own "personal" computers? What if you can no longer buy used computers from official channels but have to find local shops or sharpen up on soldering skills and find parts from dumps? The big techs will conveniently "rent out" cloud computer for us to use, in exchange of all of your data.

"Don't you all have cellphones?"

Are these the picks and shovels?

Is the profitability of these electronics manufacturers more likely than the companies that are buying up all their future inventory?

What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?

It's still absolutely fascinating to me that basically the whole modern tech industry and the economic growth from it rests on the shoulders of a single company that has all of their important factories on a single island that's under constant threat of invasion. On top of that they themselves are reliant on a single company that's able to produce the machine required to print the wafers.

I don't know if TSMC has anything to do with hard drive production, but the reliance on very few players is also a problem in that industry.

Yeah, this is slowing down growth and profits. The AI hype is sucking everything dry, from HVAC services to hardware.

This is the consequence of "I don't want to write this function myself, I'll get the plagiarism machine to do it for me"

I was recently involved in a large server purchase for work, where we wanted 72 hard drives of 24TB each for a server. They were available last year, but last month the largest we could get were 20TB drives.

This is all basically a textbook example of irrational market decisions. There’s clearly a bubble and not enough money coming in to pay for the AI bonanza.

It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That’s just masked at the moment because of all the capital being pumped in to cover for the lack of actual revenue to pay for everything. The structural mismatch at the moment is gigantic, and the markets are getting increasingly impatient waiting for the revenue to materialize.

Mark this post… in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market after folks pick up the pieces of imploded AI companies.

(For the record, I’m a huge fan of AI, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also think a giant business and financial bubble is about to implode).

HDDs, RAM, and chips have so many health metrics and methods that you really shouldn't be afraid to buy them used. The only special requirement is a RasPi test rig. That and a 30 day return window.

Great. I’ve just returned a WD drive to Amazon after it arrived crushed in a torn-open paper bag.

The replacement arrived also in a paper bag and went straight back, this time for a refund.

I guess I should have kept that one and hoped for the best.

Good alternatives? I’ve only recently been enlightened on how profoundly sh__ty SSD is for long-term storage and I have a whole lot of images my parents took traveling the last few years of their lives.

I'm not against subsidies but the concentration is a problem. This money could have spurned grass roots participation in these emerging industries, but instead they chose to go with the most heinous of monocultures, leaving billions of people out of the loop.

My machine was built up from parts in 2014.

6-7 years ago when GPU prices went up, I hoped nothing would break. Last year when RAM prices went up I did the same. Now with drive prices going up, it's the same thing.

It's interesting because I've always built mid-tier machines over the years and it was in the neighborhood of ~$700 at the time. Now the same thing is almost double that but the performance is no where near twice as good for general computer usage.

It's interesting to see here that spending is irrational, but actually even if AI improvements slow down it's more rational for companies to spend more and underutilize the machines than to underspend and get disrtupted.

On the otherhand lots of people here are even more uncomfortable of the other option, which is quite possible: AI software algorithms may scale better than the capacity of companies that make the hardware. Personally I think hardware is the harder to scale from the two and this is just the beginning.

It started with RAM; now with hard drives and SSDs. This is not looking good. But at least you can buy used ones for a pretty good price, for now.

This is getting ridiculous. Never before has an unwanted product been thrust so forcefully and artificially into the market that it disrupts the supply line for real products with actual demand.

I console myself with knowledge of the economics maxim that every supply shortage is usually, eventually, followed by a supply glut.

One can only hope that that's the principle at work here, anyway. It could also be a critically damped system for all I know. Unfortunately I studied control systems too...

I might have been more concerned if it was a different drive manufacturer.. some users won't forgive them for the WD Red debacle where they lied about what was in the drive.

Presumably they're also looking to increase production capacity as fast as possible - within the year?

I'd have thought HDDs aren't at the top of the list for AI requirements, are other component manufacturers struggling even more to meet demand?

I listed some hard drives on Friday on eBay.. most of them refurbished... within 5 minutes got a message from a person who wanted them all... shipped them an hour later

sighs at her local backup drive that just gave up the ghost

thanks, AI-boosting motherfuckers, thanks a lot

I built a new server this time last year. My board does 6 channel RAM so I bought 6x32GB ECC DDR5. $160 a stick at the time. Just for grins I looked up the same product number at the same supplier I originally bought from. $1300 apiece. One of the VMs running on that server is TrueNAS, with 4 20TB WD Red Pros. God help me if I have to replace a drive.

i am happy i bought 5x10TB drives two months ago, anticipating this exact scenario.

I bought 6x refurbished ultrastars for ~$100/ea Black Friday 2024. They were over $200/ea 2025. Samsung T7 (and shield) SSD’s have 2x-3x. Can’t get 1TB for less than like $180 right now. It’s ridiculous

Is this for NVME only or spinning drives too? I use both, but I actually have use cases for HDDs and hope those are less affected.

Not only storage, cheapest 32 GB RAM that I can find is around 200 euros.

Take a look at prices of SSDs and RAM too.

Do they really think they will get some money from the AI ponzi scheme ?

Well, at least they might still have a product to sell once the AI bubble pops, unlike with NVIDIA which does seem to kinda forgot to design new consumer GPUs after getting high on AI money.

Good luck to everyone. Home you made some reserve.

Yes, AI is nice, but I also like to be able to buy some RAM and drives…

does that only include SSDs, or does it include HDDs as well?