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Comment by trueismywork

9 days ago

Given 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.

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trueismywork

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kalleboo  9 days ago

Actually used hard disks have gotten pretty popular in the past few years, with sellers like ServerPartDeals building up a reputation by selling drives that are properly tested and recertified. As long as you have redundancy and backups by all accounts they hold up pretty well.

  • gck1  8 days ago

    SPD is out of stock as well for all their high capacity, manufacturer recertified drives.

    Got the 20TB Seagate recert in May 2025 for $239. Now it's $500 and out of stock [1].

    Got another 28TB Seagate recert in Sep 2025 for $398. Now it's $482 and out of stock [2]. Same drive, but seller refurbished is also OOS, but at $700.

    I sure hope everything in my homelab NAS outlives the AI bubble. Otherwise, I'll have to shut it down, as getting a replacement for ANY part inside it is going to be stupid expensive. I'm at least thankful I went for DDR4 motherboard instead of DDR5.

    [1] https://serverpartdeals.com/products/seagate-exos-x20-st2000...

    [2] https://serverpartdeals.com/products/seagate-exos-st28000nm0...

    • kalleboo  7 days ago

      Yeah AI killed that market just like everything else. I'm sure the supply of used drives has also dried up as the equation of "cost per TB of power and rack space" vs "cost per TB of replacing with newer, denser drives" has gone haywire.

digiown  9 days ago

I don't think the HDDs are being used for any intensive loads. They have too much latency for most of that. It's probably just archival storage for their scraped content and generated slop.

  • zozbot234  9 days ago

    For "cold" archival storage you would want to use tape, which is far cheaper per TB at scale.

    • digiown  9 days ago

      I don't mean that type of archive, but rather "just in case" data like "last month's scrape of this website" after we scraped it 5 more times this month or higher resolution versions of book scans. You might want to still be able to dump it out quickly if you need it. Money is no object for these companies and the cost of HDDs is more than low enough for the flexibility they provide.