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Data centers are now hoarding SSDs as hard drive supplies dry up (www.techspot.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/technology@lemmy.world

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According to Taiwan tech publication DigiTimes, most AI firms are unwilling to wait two years for HDD supplies to stabilize and are shifting to SSDs instead. To contain costs, they are choosing QLC NAND-based drives over the faster, more durable, and more expensive TLC variants.

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[-] Asafum@lemmy.world 297 points 1 month ago

"Why does the population hate us? We're only completely destroying the consumer electronics market, accelerating climate change, aiming to eliminate countless jobs, increasing power costs, and stealing the works of millions of people to feed our system all so we can get even more obscenely wealthy? Please clap."

[-] DaddleDew@lemmy.world 131 points 1 month ago

You forgot to mention that the product they're sacrificing everything for is widely failing to meet expectations and that they will likely expect taxpayers to bail them out when their investments fail and threaten to take out the entire economy with themselves

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 month ago

Also in a few years when the AI generated nonsense code reaches a critical point and a ton of important systems grind to a halt, we'll expect all of you that we fired to come back and un-fuck it for us so we can keep on making money. On temporary contracts and at reduced wages of course because times are tough.

[-] Nikelui@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

But the crash is the moment where the people with actual tech knowledge will have leverage to say them: "pay me 10 times my standard rate or get bent"

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[-] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

On temporary contracts and at reduced wages of course because times are tough.

Software engineers predicted this would happen. The percentage of developers that love fixing other people's code is essentially zero, fixing ai code is even smaller.

If they require low wages, they'll only get the worst of the worst. Expect this phase to repeat until they are forced to hire for competence and pay above market rate required to convince senior developers to deal with not just the ai mess but all the failed attempts to turn it around.

[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

I have a feeling, that the tech sector has enough kompromat on a lot of important people to keep the bubble from bursting.

[-] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 35 points 1 month ago

Didn't forget draining all their drinking water. Violating everyone's copyright. Driving teens to suicide. Giving terrible medical advice. And Generating csam.

[-] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The water things still baffles me. Like...just...cycle it. It's a heat exchange system.

What do they do with the water? Pump thru once and then dump it? Why can't they repurpose it? Why can't they use gray water?

I don't get it but that's likely a me problem.

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 month ago

Evaporative cooling. They're trying to save on their electric bills by not using AC. Or sometimes they're cooling the AC condensers themselves this way.

The amount of heat generated is so large they can't properly cool it with a closed loop system.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I, for one, applaud anything that helps destroy the current Intellectual Property system.

Not the other things, though.

[-] ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 3 points 1 month ago

Except the ones feeling the hurt the most are the little guys

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

Agreed.

One single potentially good thing in the middle of bad things still adds to something bad.

My point is that this shit is happening either way no matter how shit it all is, so if we can recognize and extract one good thing out of it at least on the other side we'll have one good thing, whilst if we don't, we'll have nothing good at all.

[-] DarkSideOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

I am start to think they are going on the acceleroism theory to push the society to the limits and destroy all for change

Some think this could lead to a more equallytary society, some wants to make a more centralized and controlled by one power sort of society, there is 2 different school of thought on this.

But we are clearly going to have big changes

[-] Strider@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

It's a mystery!

[-] MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world 46 points 1 month ago

How do we make the AI firms bankrupt faster?

[-] derpgon@programming.dev 12 points 1 month ago

At this moment I am seriously considering if we mayhaps need a tool that automatically queries the AI tools with random garbage just to eat up their budget.

[-] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 month ago

That counts as usage, they'll use it to convince investors.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The silver lining in all this is that when this bubble explodes we'll probably have a glut in the supply of HDDs and SSDs, driving prices down.

Just hold any plans to upgrade your hardware for a year or two and you'll end up better of (for many it will even be a good exercise to wean oneself out of the mindless "instant gratification" impulses one is indoctrinated into by Consumer Society).

[-] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The social dynamic would flip overnight if Americans suddenly had self control. The oligarchs control us by controlling our habits, and so many people are mindless about their habits and are impulsive and subservient as a result.

Just buy essentials and make your fun with what you have. Call it "soft striking".

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Exactly.

People behaving as "consumers" supports the current system and hence supports the harmful side effects of such system, from the systemic suffering from wealth inequality to ecological destruction.

Whilst very few of us, living within this system, can in practice stop living within the system, we can refrain from living in accordance with the rules of the system which are not imposed on us via removing all other choices or force, but which we are "nudged" or manipulated to follow using marketing or even propaganda, and pretty much everything which is "impulse" or "deriving a momentary pleasure from buying" are the latter kind of thing.

[-] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The social dynamic would flip overnight if Americans suddenly had self control.

"If only everyone would get together and collectively do " we could actually fix a lot of problems.

There is no solidarity in society. Much of that is by design, but a lot of it is human nature.

[-] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

More of it is by design than you seem to think. Look at all the effort and money being put into dividing people... if entropy was humanity's natural state, why all the effort to make it happen? And I didn't say some silver bullet would do it, but that the more people take control over their habits, the less they inherently give up control to the wire pullers...

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

Edward 'The Father of Public Relations' Bernays

[-] EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Tribalism is an inherent part of human nature. Capitalism and nationalism certainly exacerbate and exploit this though, no doubt about it.

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[-] charles@social.charles.wiki 6 points 1 month ago

Actually no. We won't due to anti gray market policies from data centers. For example Google shreds all HDDs after their service life(5years max usually) expires. We have a net loss from the data center hardware fiasco.

[-] TheProtagonist@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

you'll end up better

...maybe not if you are part of that bubble in some way, e.g. by participating in the corresponding stock markets that are currently dominated by those tech companies.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago

So best change your investment strategy, then.

If people persist in riding this bubble out of greed, it's only fair if they get burned when it blows up.

[-] ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

The devices will be returned to the supplier (they are supplied on credit) and then destroyed.

The manufacturers won't want to flood the market with discounted hardware.

[-] mlg@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

Next year's CES is gonna be every AI product from this year's CES but with no progress on release date because they can't even buy the consumer grade hardware to produce it since it all went into data centers lol.

[-] AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 29 points 1 month ago

Man, fuck those guys

[-] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 23 points 1 month ago

Back to punch cards we go. Or are they hoarding paper too?

[-] unphazed@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

"This just in. Panic buying of paper has led to shortages in timber, resulting in another round of toilet paper scarcity."

[-] WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 1 points 1 month ago

Cue that guy laughing in between mountains of toilet paper

https://youtu.be/1pqXaVVmN-c

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[-] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 1 month ago

Are now? Haven't they been using flash first?

Hard drives suck for that work load. Their seek times are huge, their throughput is awful, and they're worse storage density than HDDs. You can fit 24 2.5" ssds into a 2u server. 16TB in a 2.5" > 24TB in 3.5" SSDs were first to skyrocket in price vs HDDs.

[-] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 26 points 1 month ago

No. AI companies have huge storage requirements for training data. Flash storage is not cost efficient for mass storage quantities.

[-] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

For massive companies space is as costly as the price of the storage. Especially these AI companies don’t care much about the price of things.

[-] EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

Something tells me you’ve never worked for a massive company.

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[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 10 points 1 month ago

A"I" companies want to store petabytes of "good" training data

[-] TehWorld@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Exabytes. Petabytes are easily surpassed by a lot of companies these days.

[-] Auth@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

the consumer hardware market is so tiny. It has almost no buying power or pull. Its hard to expect them to cater to it when its single digit % of their overall sales.

[-] Ferrous@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

[-] neblA@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago

I have one in my basement

[-] khanh@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

youre rich

[-] No1@aussie.zone 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, me too. I keep it at the bottom of a well, and use a bucket to lower things up and down.

Wait, what were we talking about again?

[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

On the upside, we consumers get to have the superior TLC SSDs (better write durability).

[-] village604@adultswim.fan 13 points 1 month ago

Assuming that the chip manufacturers don't drop TLC production to fill AI orders.

[-] Blaster_M@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Let's hope not

[-] UnityDevice@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

But at double the price that they were a few months ago.

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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2026

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