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Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
- dClauzel 7mo agoGood 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…
- Sharlin 7mo agoThe future is thin clients for everyone, requiring a minimal amount of RAM and storage because all they are is a glorified ChatGPT interface.
- XorNot 7mo agoIt won't last. If the demand is sustained then new factories will open up and drive the price down. More likely a couple of big financing wobbles lead to a fire sale. It isn't practical for HDD supply to be wedged because in 5 years the disks start failing.
- huijzer 7mo agoI'm running multiple services such as Forgejo, Audiobookshelf, Castopod and they all need no more than roughly 100 MB RAM. There is one exception though. Open WebUI with a whopping 960 MB. It's literally a ChatGPT interface. I'm only using external API providers. No local models running. Meanwhile my website that runs via my own Wordpress-like software written in Rust [1] requires only a few MB of RAM, so it's possible. [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx https://github.com/rikhuijzer/fx
- armada651 7mo agoEven if the AI bubble bursts, having successfully cornered the compute market they can just go rent seeking instead by renting out cloud workstations, given that they've made the hardware to build a workstation yourself unaffordable.
- Ekaros 7mo agoYou know what is the sad part. I don't think software developers or LLMs know how or want anymore to make low resource consumption software that runs on a thin client. It will be some browser based thing capping to whatever memory is available on the system.
- xantronix 7mo agoIs this an inevitable future? The amount of people ready to cede their computational resources, thinking, digital sovereignty, to centralised platforms, all in the name of progress, is truly shocking to me, especially in the current political moment. The main reason I do not prioritise AI usage in my own life is to retain my skills and mental acuity. All of the forms of computing and opportunities that I value do not require AI to achieve. I can understand why people feel differently from me, though, because AI and AI-adjacent things are where all of the money is right now.
- Sharlin 7mo agoNo, clearly not. First, future is never inevitable, and second, I was being ironic. Though the fact is that thin vs rich clients is one of the major fashion cycles in the IT industry.
- emsign 7mo agoYeah, this is slowing down growth and profits. The AI hype is sucking everything dry, from HVAC services to hardware.
- voidUpdate 7mo agoThis is the consequence of "I don't want to write this function myself, I'll get the plagiarism machine to do it for me"
- co_king_3 7mo ago[dead]
- szszrk 7mo agoI honestly think it's not that simple. The ones who spend billions on integrating public cloud LLM services are not the ones writing that function. They are managers who based on data pulled out of thin air say "your goal for this year is to increase productivity by X%. With AI, while staffing is going slightly down". I have to watch AI generated avatars on the most boring topics imaginable, because the only "documentation" and link to actual answer is in a form of fake person talking. And this is encouraged! Then the only measure of success is either AI services adoption (team count), or sales data. That is the real tragedy and the real scale - big companies pushing (external!) AI services without even proof that it justifies the cost alone. Smooth talking around any other metric (or the lack of it).
- GuB-42 7mo agoAnd what's wrong with not wanting to write functions yourself? It is a perfectly reasonable thing, and in some cases (ex: crypto), rolling your own is strongly discouraged. That's the reason why libraries exist, you don't want to implement your own associative array every time your work needs it do you? As for plagiarism, it is not something to even consider when writing code, unless your code is an art project. If someone else's code does the job better then yours, that's the code you should use, you are not trying to be original, you are trying to make a working product. There is the problem of intellectual property laws, but it is narrower than plagiarism. For instance, writing an open source drop-in replacement of some proprietary software is common practice, it is legal and often celebrated as long as it doesn't contain the original software code, in art, it would be plagiarism. Copyright laundering is a problem though, and AI is very resource intensive for a result of dubious quality sometimes. But that just shows that it is not a good enough "plagiarism machine", not that using a "plagiarism machine" is wrong.
- BLKNSLVR 7mo agoAre 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?
- smashface 7mo agoIf AI continues at this trajectory, sure, likely to the picks and shovels. If AI has a bubble burst, you could see a lot of used hardware flood the market and then companies like WD could have a hard time selling against their previous inventory.
- mrweasel 7mo agoThe problem is more likely that companies like WD doesn't know if this will be a bubble or not. Currently they can milk the market by raising their prices and just rely on their current production facilities, maybe expand a little. If there's going to be crash, then it's better to have raised the price, even if just temporarily, rather than being left standing with excessive production capacity. If it's long term, it would be better to be the front runner on additional capacity, but that's assuming continuous growth. If it all comes down, or even just plateaus, it's better to simply raise prices.
- trueismywork 7mo agoGiven how hard AI is on I/O, while restarting if hardware might go second hand. I dont see hard drives go second hand. Most hardware that we get might be used beyond redeeming even at free price.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- m4rtink 7mo agoDo 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.
- Sharlin 7mo agoThey haven't forgotten, they've expressly decided to soft-pivot away from consumer GPUs. RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018… (oops, 2028. No time travel involved. Probably). If the bubble has burst by then.
- topspin 7mo ago> RTX 60x0 series is apparently coming in 2018 That's either a typo, or NVidia has achieved some previously unheard of levels of innovation.
- Sharlin 7mo agoThey're hedging on LLMs inventing time travel any day now.
- jodrellblank 7mo ago> "apparently coming in 2018… maybe. If the bubble has burst by then." Spoiler from the future: it hasn't. Get your investments in while you have time.
- glimshe 7mo agoThere'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.
- appreciatorBus 7mo agoRegardless where demand comes from, it takes time to spin up a hard drive factory, and prices would have to rise enough that, as a producer, you would feel confident that a new hard drive factory will actually pay off. Conversely, if you feel that boom is irrational and temporary, as a producer you’d be quite wary of investing money in a new factory if there was a risk it would be producing into a glut in a few years.
- anonymars 7mo agoIf I remember during a previous GPU shortage (crypto?), Nvidia (and/or TSMC?) basically knew the music would stop and didn't want to be caught with its pants down after making the significant investments necessary to increase production Not to mention that without enough competition, you can just raise prices, which, uh (gestures at Nvidia GPU price trends...)
- XorNot 7mo agoSomewhat ironically the AI boom means Nvidia would've easily made their money back on that investment though and probably even more thoroughly owned the GPGPU space. But as it is it's not like they made any bad decisions either.
- alexpotato 7mo agoSimilar thing happened with mask manufacturers during COVID. They didn't spin up additional mask production b/c they knew the pandemic would eventually pass. They learned this lesson from SARS. Not maxing out production during spikes (or seasonality) in demand is a key tenet of being a "rational economic actor".
- Jyaif 7mo agodoes that only include SSDs, or does it include HDDs as well?
- jacquesm 7mo agoIt includes all forms of storage except for USB devices, GPUs and high end CPUs. The latter you can still get but you're going to have some severe sticker shock.
- antonyh 7mo agoMaybe shucking USB HDDs is the short-term answer.
- M95D 7mo agoIs that still possible? Aren't they native USB with no adapter?
- ddtaylor 7mo agoIs 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.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoAll I know is I saw most of my go-to refurbished enterprise HDD’s 2-3x during Black Friday a few months ago compared to a year prior.
- layer8 7mo agoIt’s affecting both. HDD maybe slightly less/slower, but you’re paying significantly more than six months ago in any case.
- ErneX 7mo agoThis particular news is for spinning drives, the other types we already had news about upcoming shortages earlier on.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoI 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
- dgxyz 7mo agoBought a few 2TB T7 shield disks last year before the boom. Thank fuck I did it then.
- Forgeties79 7mo agoTake good care of them!
- cmiles8 7mo agoThis 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).
- infecto 7mo agoIs there an industrial bubble? Probably. > It’s building materials being in short supply when there’s obviously more houses than buyers. That I think is a hard one to prove and is where folks are figuring it out. There is obvious continued demand and certainly a portion of it is from other startups spending money. I don’t think it’s obvious though where we are at.
- doom2 7mo ago> in a few years folks will be coming up with creative ideas for cheap storage and GPUs flooding the market COVID was six years ago. In that time, GPU prices haven't gone down (and really have only increased). Count me skeptical that there will be a flood of cheap components.
- selectodude 7mo agoI feel like the most recent time you could reasonably get an nvidia *80 GPU at the store for a normal amount of money was almost a decade ago.
- delecti 7mo agoBut that's a tautology. The Nvidia *80 GPU's MSRP has been unreasonable for that long (1080 launched at $600 May 2016, which IMO was already excessive). But there was a window as recently as fall (3-5 months ago) where you could get most PC parts at MSRP. Granted it was a pretty short window, before the last dying whispers of crypto and COVID induced scarcity were overtaken by the surge of the AI bubble.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- xienze 7mo agoI 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.
- kotaKat 7mo agoBest Buy is actively selling 2x8gb sticks of DDR4 3200 for $80 a stick. I was floored. Ten bucks a gig, $160 for the pack. We're fucking doomed.
- mnw21cam 7mo agoI 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.
- huijzer 7mo agoNot only storage, cheapest 32 GB RAM that I can find is around 200 euros.
- xiphias2 7mo agoIt'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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- 55555 7mo agoWhat 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?
- Ekaros 7mo agoHearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering. And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.
- red75prime 7mo agoAll the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.
- jmclnx 7mo agoI am surprised by that too. I thought everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe ? I was toying with getting a 2T HDD for a BSD system I have, I guess not now :)
- dominicrose 7mo agoEveryone moved to SDDs or NVMe. If you're right, that includes manufacturers. HDDs still have advantages over SSDs for specific needs, like more reliable long-term unelectrified storage. It's also possible that the high price of SSDs made HDDs an option again.
- pixl97 7mo agoReally if you're writing large solid files hard drives aren't that bad. If you can have the system split out one file per drive at a time then you'll avoid a lot of the fragments
- 7mo ago
- cs02rm0 7mo agoPresumably 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?
- thephyber 7mo agoWhy would they? If we weren’t talking about AI, was there another high demand sector / customer for spinning platters? And their margins get fat now that supply is relatively constant but AI demand has saturated their current production numbers.
- aceelric 7mo agoIt 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.
- arbuge 7mo agoI 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...
- Ekaros 7mo agoIf storage and memory manufacturer don't respond with increasing supply. There might not be glut. Just postponed demand that will slowly get fulfilled over longer period. That is if we were in steady state. On other hand if there is bigger economic turmoil that might mean that the postponed demand does not realise as there is no purchasing power...
- bluGill 7mo agoI was thinking than until my NAS gave me a error on one of my harddrives, now I'm in the market for a replacement while I still have redundancy
- xpe 7mo agoPeople with a control theory background are welcome in economics; the field is more diverse than some would recognize. Certain professions and subfields are more open than others. There are plenty of economists who care about things like resilience and dampening shocks. I would love if more non-traditional economists got involved in the public sphere by which I mean: writing about economic trends, public policy, regulation, rate-adjustment, etc.
- soulofmischief 7mo agoAs an engineer with a passing control theory background and a breadth of general knowledge, I'd love to explore this space more and find a way to apply my knowledge and share the results. Are there any particular problems you think well-suited to this treatment?
- xpe 7mo ago
- markus_zhang 7mo agoBetter 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?"
- Ekaros 7mo agoI have heard that you can get used laptops. But they do not come with memory or SSD anymore... As even used components are now valuable enough to be removed and sold.
- markus_zhang 7mo agoOr worse, they have memory and SSD soldered on board, and are broken, so you have to learn soldering skills too.
- digiown 7mo agoMany laptops from last few years have soldered memory. Your previous laptop's SSD can also be reused, since those don't die that quickly compared to the laptop.
- shimman 7mo agoDamn really? One of my go to moves when helping small political campaigns is to buy like a 2015 MBP and turn it into a locally hosted server to run all their stuff on the cheap.
- cosmic_cheese 7mo agoOlder MacBooks with socketed storage may actually be exempted because they use a proprietary connector instead of standard m.2.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
- blurbleblurble 7mo agoI'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.
- minkeymaniac 7mo agoI 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
- nialv7 7mo agoi am happy i bought 5x10TB drives two months ago, anticipating this exact scenario.
- robinwhg 7mo agoIt'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.
- mapt 7mo agoInvestors love a monopoly, and establishing this required more than a trillion dollars of investment sustained over a couple decades.
- xpe 7mo ago> Investors love a monopoly... Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Underlying such a single point-of-failure is an implied but immense hope and thus pressure for stability. I wonder what the prediction markets saying about current levels of geopolitical stability in Taiwan?
- bit1993 7mo ago> Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Interesting. Capitalism is often touted to be more decentralized than socialism, but this is an example of how it can centralize.
- pixl97 7mo agoSocialism is always talked out how it works out in practice, capitalism is talked about how it works out in theory
- mapt 7mo agoWe don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban administrations. A partisan Republican will reliably interrupt you to shout nonsense, as if admitting a single positive outcome is trying to deceive them. As if a cost-benefit analysis can just be cut in half. As if these were not just authoritarian/totalitarian, but completely lacking domestic support. This outcome was achieved with a great deal of money and propaganda over more than a century.
- josefritzishere 7mo agoThis 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.
- nickjj 7mo agoMy 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.
- jccc 7mo agoGreat. 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.
- literalAardvark 7mo agoI'm sure Amazon isn't the only shop that delivers to your area
- jccc 7mo agoThe premise of this news is that prices are going to climb and availability is going to drop. And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore. Walmart sells what appears to be an older version of the drive and I might have to cross my fingers and just get one of those.
- malfist 7mo ago> And I’m not keen on having anyone ship me one of these anymore. Isn't that what you're doing ordering off amazon with their comingled inventory? Besides, there's a spectrum of sellers between "Amazon" and "anybody", you can even, perhaps, purchase directly from the manufacturer.
- jccc 7mo agoI meant that after the Amazon experience, I don't want to buy a HDD online. Would much prefer to get it locally in person.
- notpublic 7mo agoBestbuy with local pickup. They price match Amazon. B&H Photo is another option.
- egypturnash 7mo agosighs at her local backup drive that just gave up the ghost thanks, AI-boosting motherfuckers, thanks a lot
- vaylian 7mo agoRotating or SSD?
- shmerl 7mo agoTake a look at prices of SSDs and RAM too.
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoHDDs, 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.
- saghm 7mo agoI feel like the goal is to avoid buying something broken in the first place, not just to be able to tell if you've bought something that turns out to be broken
- yndoendo 7mo agoThe 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.
- estimator7292 7mo agoThis only works if you exclude datacenters Georg who lives in a server rack and buys 10,000 hard drives a day. Unfortunately, there are several such outlier entities which collectively control enough resources to price literally everyone else out.
- Ajedi32 7mo agoThe laws of supply and demand are not optional. If you try to use government to force reality to conform to your idea of how things should work you're just going to get 1,000 companies buying 10,000 hard disks each rather than 10 companies buying 1,000,000 each. And if you try to outlaw that somehow then the market will just route around your new scheme in another way, creating even more unintended consequences in the process. If you must meddle, you're much better off working with market forces rather than trying to fight against them.
- e145bc455f1 7mo ago>The only way to combat this is the same way to combat toilet paper shortages. I buy one hard disk, AI company busy 40% of global supply. Me not buying that one hard disk is not going to change anything. >According to Western Digital, thanks to a surge in demand from its enterprise customers, the consumer market now accounts for just 5 percent of the company's revenue.
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- j45 7mo agoI 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.
- nutjob2 7mo agoI pray someone steps into the market and takes all their consumer/SME business from them. I know thats not that simple or at all probable, but it would be great time to take market share and great for us little guys.
- hshdhdhj4444 7mo agoThe reason this is a problem is because whatever value AI may have (personally I’m as long as one can get), companies believe that right now it’s a government sponsored financial bubble. So they’re unwilling to spend on increasing capacity because they don’t expect this demand to last.
- SkyeCA 7mo agoNot only does AI want to take my job, it also wants to make my hobbies unaffordable. I love modern world so much /s
- opengrass 7mo agoThere's always πfs. https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoAny point in setting my laptop to minimal power usage by default and drives to aggressively sleep, in order to try to extend life? Or is sleep and extra power cycle and better to not sleep my M2 drives so they aren't being powered up/down?
- zozbot234 7mo agoThe main thing that shortens the lifetime of solid state drives is sustained writes over time. You should disable all system logging options and all "spotlight databases for fast search", avoid swap use and not let the drives "sleep" too aggressively since this will force the system to persist some volume of writes from RAM to disk that might have turned out to be unnecessary down the road.
- _lvbh 7mo agothe current spikes tempt me to sell off my home lab. a mac mini to sell to the open claw bros, 5tb HDD, Intel NUC, some SSDs, and a 5 year old dell laptop. can always buy back after the crash.
- tgrowazay 7mo agoYou could buy a house and a private jet with these if you held just one more year.
- geye1234 7mo agoI am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better. How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?
- zozbot234 7mo agoSpinning HDDs will eventually be at risk of failing for purely mechanical reasons, so beyond handling them with care you can't really do all that much. Keeping them always-on may be a viable strategy for drives that are already mostly on, otherwise, just spin them up once in a while, but don't expect this to lower risk significantly. An old drive should simply have its contents transferred to new media, and then be treated as something ephemeral that may fail at any time without warning.
- lobsterthief 7mo agoI’ll add: if you’re using your drive as a NAS, use a drive model that’s meant for this purpose, and avoid SSDs
- phil21 7mo agoI have found there is really no practical way to predict the bathtub curve for hard drive failures. The solution is just a lot of redundancy for larger disk arrays whenever practical. I currently have a 15x1TB 7200 RPM zpool in raidz2 I use for "scratch space" for some automation projects. It writes about 500GB-1TB or so a day and has for... over 18 years. I have had exactly one drive fail from that pool, under heavy abuse. That one failed a year or two in. Prior to my personal use it was beat on (mostly reads) as backing storage for uploaded images for a large website where the drives operated at 90% or higher I/O utilization pretty much 24x7. I have other pools of disks where I have replaced over 50% of them 6 years in, with batches of failures seemingly at random. You start to notice patterns with various drive models - but not until well after the point of purchase where it's far too late to predict based on anything like vendor reputation or whatnot. I've had batches of various WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and HGST all both be incredibly reliable and some incredibly not so. Some of the same model series just different drive sizes have wildly different reliability characteristics. I don't bother pulling "old" drives out of production preemptively any more. The only thing I do preemptively now is pull drives with very critical SMART prefailure warnings such as a consistently growing number of unrecoverable sector errors. That one and a couple other attributes are worth watching trends for, but the rest are pretty pointless and really do not seem to correlate much. And again, it varies by drive model for which times to pay attention to a particular SMART attribute and which not to. I simply treat drives as wear items that fail with little to no notice, and just make sure I can survive a number of simultaneous failures at once. Make sure to regularly test your monitoring! Not power cycling drives is huge as well, as you note. For example these old 1TB spinners: 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 078 078 000 Old_age Always - 158328 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 13
- dennysora 7mo agoThese really are some of the toughest years for people trying to buy a computer. We only recently emerged from the cryptocurrency-driven crunch, and now AI has arrived—and this wave is far more severe than crypto. In that light, Apple’s Macs are actually quite good value for money.
- gck1 7mo agoI'm wondering - if AI companies are looking at 'build your own saas' as their biggest moat that will make investors happy and drive profits to prevent bubble from bursting, surely hoarding up all the inventory that saas companies depend on directly isn't that great of an idea?