28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Just in time for me to want to upgrade the home server storage.
I guess I’m gonna have to salvage old hard drives and deal with the tiny space.
I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more… 😭
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.
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
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…
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
Yeah right, if they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
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.
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
Glad I picked up new NAS drives when I did. 8x 18TB Seagate Exos for $180 each. Two years later its doubled
I am so fucking jealous of you right now.
- want to make a server
- RAM and HDD prices spike
Fuck this
Proxmox cluster and shuck externals I started during the 2008 crash this is how I’d do budget HL
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.
Billionaires are not going to give you a chance to decide whether you want a dumb thin AI client or not.
You won’t be able to procure the hardware even if you could afford it.
We are all gonna be some version the brotherhood of steel now
and if you don’t shut up and like it you will be cut out of the internet … black balled by ATT/T Mobile/Verizon while they refuse to drop fiber to the curb but will end up puling the copper off the poles so no more wired internet.
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.
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.
I’ll just note there is still a loophole: external drives have sales in the $10-11/TB range, and you can shuck the drives.
Right now $280 for 26TB, for example: https://slickdeals.net/f/19091557-26tb-seagate-expansion-desktop-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-280-free-shipping
That’s apparently CMR Barracuda inside.
These may disappear completely, or may simply be drives that AI data centers do not prefer permanently, since they are not rated for 24/7 use. Fine for RAID home server use, apparently, though
Be wary of using shucked drives in a NAS, especially barracudas, they’re not rated for the noise and vibration
I remember doing this years ago, but the only problem I remember is they were 2 hard drives instead of 1 inside split in size to lower the cost. Idk if its different now, but if you expect 1 drive at that size that could be wrong.
Did you buy an offbrand ext drive? I mainly stick to EasyStore models (and its been a minute since I had to buy), and they were always 1 internal HDD in their annoying to open enclosure
It’s just one: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1mkt0vd/26tb_seagate_expansion_shucking_experience/
The size of the enclosure isn’t large enough to accommodate more than one 3.5" drive.
Fuck, I thought HDDs were spared cause of their low speed.
Companies usually use HDDs because they last longer and are cheaper
They still have controllers with chips.
We will never be able to replace our old thinkpads
Goddamnit. First ram now this? I’m never making my nas
Damn. 2/8 drives in my array have died. I was going to replace them, but at this price point I might just delete some porn instead.
Or buy cloud storage.
Don’t buy cloud storage that’s what they want you to do
this is the answer.
