• themurphy@lemmy.ml
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    9 days ago

    Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?

    Why HDDs?

    • WereCat@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      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…

      • 73ms@sopuli.xyz
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        9 days ago

        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…

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          9 days ago

          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.

    • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 days ago

      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.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        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

    • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Yeah right, if they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.

      • Denvil@lemmy.ml
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        9 days ago

        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

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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      9 days ago

      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)

  • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    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.

  • eletes@sh.itjust.works
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    9 days ago

    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

  • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
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    9 days ago

    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.

    • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      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.

    • Sims@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      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 ?

  • darthinvidious@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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.

  • monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    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.

      • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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        8 days ago

        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.

      • monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world
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        8 days ago

        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.

    • Kjell@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      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.

  • laserkaspar@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    My 2TB SSD (which I bought for about 100€) failed, I could get my money back but a new one is now 300€.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I got my AMD RX580 graphics card failing on me. It started to crash so frequently I had to put back my GTX1050Ti