Comment by hirako2000
16 hours ago
also bought a handful of 14 to 16tb drives. They sold for such a low price last year I thought it can't be wrong to grab them.
It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.
Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?
If I need storage now and I can't get flash disks, I will buy mechanical. Production will not ramp up overnight (or at all - there is no point investing in scaling up if I think the situation is only temporary), so an increase in demand inevitably will result in prices going up.
Btw gas goes up when oil goes up not just because it can replace it in some applications, but also because it is often produced and transported in the same areas as oil, by the same companies involved in oil, so it is typically affected in similar ways.
Yeah I have no idea the direct cause. I didn't think that the SATA controllers for a hard drive took that much.
It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.
GenAI and/or smart glasses video? WD already sold their entire 2026 production of nearline drives for data centers.
I've seen lots of articles on HN of AI startups building massive drive arrays for mass storage.
AI runs on data above all else. Gotta feed the compute.