Comment by karlkloss
16 hours ago
And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market. Save your money now and be prepared.
16 hours ago
And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market. Save your money now and be prepared.
GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.
HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.
There is also encryption at rest.
I wrote hddrand to write random data and optionally read it back to verify integrity. https://github.com/mqudsi/hddrand
When I used to do computer refurbishment, 'Boot and Nuke' was great for this. Load it up at boot, and write over the with random junk a few times.
All you really need to do is write one pass of zeros on them. That will prevent anyone but a very dedicated adversary with expensive equipment from recovering any data, especially on TB scale drives.
Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.
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All the large datacenter/cloud companies do not let hard drives leave the building.
They have enough investor money they don't need to recoup it selling used drives. Straight to the shredder.
> HDD can be written multiple times with random data
Which costs more in compute than simply throwing the drive in a shredder
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Nah, the liquidators aren't going to care about that. Those hard drives are going to be shipped out with all your wildest porn chat bot fantasies.
"Shredded onsite" means by the next user when they format the drive and write contents to it /s
I believe many enterprise drives have instant-erase functionality (presumably deleting an encryption key).
If they were encrypted to begin with, yes. Many are not.
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Depends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.
My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground. Are AI usage practices different?
It was considered a fear but I don't know if there is much truth to it. The fans and capacitors would give out long before the silicon.
Even if it say, halved the life span of the chips, that is still far longer than what most people would ever use them for.
> My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground.
No, this wasn't the case. While there were never comprehensive studies various tech media purchased these cards to run testing and found that, other than scammers, they all performed to expectation.
You can buy used car tires with 1% of thread left and they'll perform amazingly during your one time test too
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> And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market.
GPUs? No way. The datacenter cards don't even have video output ports, and I think the chips destined for AI / ML training also have everything video/render related removed from the silicon, makes for more yield.
And the other way around, using (cheap) consumer GPUs in servers, I think at least NVDA tries to prevent that with driver-based DRM, so there won't be any flooding coming from there either.
If this bubble pops you might need that money for food when bananas go from $1.50 to $150.00