Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?
Why HDDs?
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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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.
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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.
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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
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- 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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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
I don't think this is sustainable because it seems like a closed loop that eventually stops making money without any new inputs.
People NEED housing, they don't really need computer components.
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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.
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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.
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We are spiraling towards a you own nothing and rent/subscription it all society.
Honestly. Tankie as hell to say this, but thank fuck for China providing cheap easy alternatives to mainstream hardware
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
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.
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Fuck, I thought HDDs were spared cause of their low speed.
Companies usually use HDDs because they last longer and are cheaper
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Made me buy a used 10tb drive recently.
Screw them all, I will have a place for my data and I won't pay them a dollar for these shenanigans.
I will use a book shelf sized rack of RAID hubs filled with 1 GB flash drives before I buy a single fucking KB of cloud space.
I will install an ancient version of Linux on my mackie D8B soundboard and use that as my PC before I ever buy a goddamn cloud computer.
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We will never be able to replace our old thinkpads
It's been a while since I bought storage. $500 for 24TB seems like a steal to me. Not that I have any need for 24TB. Also, I don't trust Seagate drives. I'd rather have four, 6TB drives than one 24TB drive, but that's just experience talking--I've lost several drives over the years, and most of them were Seagate. YMMV.
My 2TB SSD (which I bought for about 100€) failed, I could get my money back but a new one is now 300€.
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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!!!
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
Time to buy some sbc boards so I can actually host content in ten years, with whoever's software considering the foss devs will be broke.
Thank fuck I'm a millennial and I only have thirty more years on the disappointment machine.
If you're under 30, learn how to shoot. You won't be doing much hosting.
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Goddamnit. First ram now this? I'm never making my nas
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.
Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.
Yes it does. Where do you think they store those gigantic training datasets?
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An with my investments i really wanna cash in right now, i feel like the bubble is about to burst in the next 3-6months. Then stocks would go down by like 30% and i can buy in again.
Im almost certain its gonna crash down and i wanna be out before that happens but right now stocks just go up way to much.
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