28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
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
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.
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
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.
- want to make a server
- RAM and HDD prices spike
Fuck this
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 :/
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.
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
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.
Just finished ripping about 150 of our DVD collection and space was filling up, went looking for HDDs and was surprised at the prices. Now I know why.
I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more… 😭
I have an invention that… well, you be the judge; What if we take some cheap paper… and put holes in it ? If we place the holes in a certain way, they will resemble digits and we could store information via holes in a paper ‘card’ !!
No more ram/storage problems! …oh, and very organic btw !!
Hm, we probably need a family member to do the punching/reading of holes, but doable.
Whaddoyuthink - is it a killer invention or what ?
I’d like to see a single movie stored on punch cards. It would be massive.
Not to mention the time it would take to ingest that data
They’re not the victims… WE ARE. They’re giving in to the tech bros idiocy and catering to their wishes. If they any ounce of dignity as a honorable brand, none of them would have risen their prices. There’s literally ZERO actual reason for them to do this other than tech bros rigging it against the rest of us.
Phew! I just bought three 16TB drives a couple of months ago for my jellyfin setup.
Selling them for $5000 each if anyone is interested.
Do we dare ask why you need 48TB to store media, or do we slowly back out of the room, avoiding eye contact?
Redundancy and high quality backups maybe? Some people have hoarded a lot of media over how many years, doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.
You had me at horded.
You. Had. Me. At. Horded.
If it was my setup those three drives would just give you 16TB of space. Two drives in a mirror and the third as a hot spare.
I get 4k/8k quality everything if I can. Plus my fam can queue up downloads. I had 32TB but we’ve filled it up in 18 months. I now have a backup of the stuff I really like and a bit of room to grow. They keep downloading long running series one of them got project model or something, some food shows and a tattoo show.
We are spiraling towards a you own nothing and rent/subscription it all society.
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.

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.
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
My 2TB SSD (which I bought for about 100€) failed, I could get my money back but a new one is now 300€.
I got my AMD RX580 graphics card failing on me. It started to crash so frequently I had to put back my GTX1050Ti
Noooooo!!
I just dreamt last night I had 2 more 28tb hard drives for my server to backup.
Now it’s a nightmare. Fuck AI!!!
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.











