Apparently there is a huge demand for storage, both RAM and disk. Oh, and GPUs… So what happens when large number of people are looking to buy stuff? In time, I think there is a silver lining here…
On the upside, homelabs are going to have a glut of high capacity, barely used server hard drives to choose from then this AI/data centre bubble eventually bursts?
If it bursts, that is. I have a fear that people behind AI have grown so savvy of the bubbles, that they have a complicated plan to avoid it, and artificially uphold it with the help of bribed/blackmailed politicians.
So much trading is done automatically by algorithms. There’s no panic selling anymore because the human factor is gone.
As every industry before them did.
I’m glad I bought an 8 TB HDD about a year ago as an investment, it’s now $50 more expensive a year later. I don’t plan on ever filling it up, but it’s been helpful, and good insurance to have if I ever create a project that requires that space.
I was able to update 2 of 3 devices early last year, but couldn’t upgrade my old custom build. I did that due to possible tariffs; didn’t even think about this “AI” BS. Thought may as well just buy a custom build now. Wanted to wait another year, but I won’t be upset no matter what happens with prices if I get it now. I’m not sure my old girl can outlive the return of easily available PC parts. At least I also bought some extra storage over a year ago.
so much wrong with this title.
- it’s not AI, it’s LLM slop bullshit
- it’s not the software at guilt here, it’s the sacks of shit running those companies who plan such data centers
- blamed? No, those shitheads are totally and absolutely responsible for this clusterfuck.
They’ve gone so far as to claim responsibility.
You mean brag about it?
I was trying to use the same language the news uses when a political group claims resposibilty for a bombing.
The irony is as they bid up the price of all the hardware, they are probably making their AI platforms more likely to fail due to being more expensive than their value.
We can only hope that their businesses crash hard before any of these deals come to fruition and then when the hardware has nowhere to go we can all “buy the dip” so to speak.
To be clear, I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware, but hopefully it all crashing down will help get more people into self-hosting and working on community resources and networks instead of having everything live in the cloud.
I know most of this stuff will be specialized server hardware
it actually won’t be, at least not for the hard drives. the prevailing strategy these days is just use the cheapest possible disks and deal with the failures on the software level. those disks will ultimately fail anyway and the increased price for some super-duper enterprise reliability server disk is not really worth it.
I’m currently hosting everything on old desktop PCs and SBCs but fuck it, I’ll swipe some closeout hardware and upgrade to a proper server rack.
In a similar boat, I’ve thought about that but if I ever upgraded to a stronger real centralized PC I’d have to do a bunch of Docker setup and if anything breaks my whole system would go down. As it is, with piecemeal shitass laptops each running individual services I get lots of redundancy!
Definitely same.
Western Digital chief Tiang Yew Tan told analysts “We’re pretty much sold out for calendar '26. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers.”
the dow is 50k and 37% of the market is made up of those seven
freaking financial human centipede
I can’t wait for it to crash and burn, this bubble is getting so ridiculous.
that crash and burn will be the onus of the consumer not being able to consume.
we will lose access to free range computing and have to live with asking AI for permission to use the computing power and network resources to play a game or pay our bills online. And paytoll for that permission.
that will be the crash and burn victims here.
I brought my 2003 laptop back to life for shits and giggles recently. It’s made me realize how bloated software has become. It’s still just as usable as it was 20 years ago when you remove all the fancy crap and use programs designed for tasks rather than living in a web browser. Sure its not fast, but once I replaced the spinning drive with an ssd, it became pretty damn usable in a modern day scenario. I really thought I would just upgrade as far as I could for fun, then slap an old archived distro on there from my college days for some good old PTSD/nostalgia. But it’s actually usable so I occasionally pull it out and do stuff on it. I’m ready to slap jaunty jackalope on it and relive going to my uni’s library to write a 10 page research paper thats due the next day, but it’s still ready to rock in modern times.
It needs to crash. If it doesn’t crash soon, things will only get worse and worse for consumers. We’re already over the edge of the cliff (imo), it’s just a matter of how far we have to fall now. If it crashes hard enough, we won’t have to live with “asking AI for permission to use the computing platform”. By the way, an LLM isn’t really capable of that at the moment, and the sooner it crashes, the less likely anything like that will happen.
🎈📌
These companies are publicly traded…
The people who run/own the AI companies would have been complete idiots to not invest in the hardware companies they were going to make these purchases from before making those purchases.
But 100 million in Seagate stock, then announce you just signed a contract buying up supply.
Your company may overpay, but you personally just made a shit ton of money. Which is the why you want your company to succeed
As a bonus, the news that you’re overpaying to buy up all the hard drives, doesn’t hurt your company it helps it.
There’s no way to monetize it anyways, the product is the stock price. And this move makes the company seem confident, which raises stock price.
That’s not even getting into the long term problem that even if AI fails, were seeing a huge migration in computing power from individuals to private corporations. That’s a big deal even if AI dies tomorrow. And they have a lot of motivation to never let us get it back.
This is illegal but I’m sure it happens all the time.
Yeah, that’s how politicians get the insider tips, it’s bribes to not go after the person who gave them the tip.
If enough of the right people make enough money, then everything about it becomes legal, or at worse a fine that’s less than the profits made.
Welp, I guess I’m all out of money for new tech. Time to travel or find a new hobby.
These sound like great ideas. Additionally, I find that making the most of the hardware I already have can be really satisfying, too.
This feels like you’re about to try and sell me on linux.
It does sound like that, doesn’t it. I’ve been down that rabbit hole, but currently my only Linux device is a steam deck. Apple stuff for most things, pc for AAA gaming.
So, no. I like Linux, but I really meant that I increasingly manage to find some satisfaction in getting „my money‘s worth“ out of my hardware instead of finding excuses to buy new stuff.
It’s nice how AI datacenters step by step swallow virtually all available hardware resources to provide digital services to users who won’t be able to use those services due to the lack of available hardware.
Hardware will be available, silly. †
You will have the “freedom” ‡ to choose from the hardware vendor* you want. Like always! ‡‡
† For $49.95 per month.
^Terms and conditions and government social score apply.^
‡‡ ^Authorized and approved by the department of national security and intelligence gathering agencies and the billionaire technofascist bros clubh^
I doubt offering AI services to the public is their goal.
that’s okay they will replace users with AI. it’s going to be AI all the way down
You can use them fine. In fact, you’ll have to on your new Android phone which has no opt out.
I bought a 22tb hdd from serverpartdeals in late December of 2025. Its now $100 more expensive, I’m glad I read the tea leaves in time but this sucks.
I got a 16TB HDD for 300€, yesterday I looked at it and it was 800€ (apparently discounted from 1000€ lol)
Same. Scored two 16TB drives and a 4GB in summer of 2025 (by pure chance though). They’re now 150%-200% the original price. Cannot wait to see this bubble pop.
I get paid on the 27th, I need two more 8TB drives to complete my NAS, my local retailer had 50+ in stock earlier this week, and now the drives are no longer even listed.
Fuck sake…
I bought 2 8TB drives last week and had to check if they were still in stock at the same retailer and they are, but the price had gone up with 23%…
I do see that another retailer has drives in stock, but at about 40-50% more than I paid back in October
Go Toshiba. If American companies got us into this mess in the first place, fuck American companies!
I will if I can, as it stands I have four 8TB seagate drives, enough for my actual storage need, but I want to have two parity drives for extra protection.
I am planning on running ZFS with Zraid2, the drives are the final piece of the puzzle to at least get it working.
When I planned the build, I planned to get another controller card and run two SSDs as well, one for cache (I can add that later), and one for VM/App storage, I also planned on getting an Intel GPU for transcoding video, and a 10Gig NIC, mainly just to say I have it, as my network isn’t more than normal gigabit.
It is getting more important to complete the build as I need to move my media from single, non raided hard drives in my computer to a well raided server that I can configure for bitrot protection.
That’s a much more sophisticated setup than mine! It may even be overkill (depending on what it is you want to host, and to how many).
I’ve been running two enterprise-grade Toshiba 16TB drives in a btrfs RAID1 since last summer. No SSD for caching (though the OS and my Docker containers run on one, with regular syncs to the slower spinning drives). No complaints so far.
I know it is a bit complex, but after seeing the shenanigans Synology tried to play and reading review about Ugreen NAS units and how they seem to connect to external servers often, I just decided to roll my own TrueNAS build.
I am using an AMD Ryzen 4600G, 32GB of RAM, a 500GB boot SSD, the only mATX board I could find with six SATA ports, the Asus B550m Pro4 and a Corsair SF750 750W PSU to power it all.
Props for the powerful DIY! You’re right about the pre-built models. I’m coming from a QNAP one, and while they’re good for learning the ropes, they’ll become pretty limited after a while. That, and the shit they’re trying to pull with proprietary HDDs.
A self-made rig gives you a lot more flexibility, although it requires you to learn a bit more. But seeing that you’re already getting comfortable with GFS, I guess you’ll manage just fine!
To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what GFS is, I have been a Linux sysadmin for a few years, but never came across that.
We used LVM and ext4 for the storage in those VMs
If you’ve got that experience under your belt, you’ll be just fine. I haven’t tackled zfs myself yet (I’m lacking the RAM, plus I was put off by the ECC RAM recommendation). But I know it unifies a lot of the things you’re already familiar with under one roof (volume management and journaling) and adds more cool features (snapshotting, RAID, encryption, bitrot protection) without you having to combine and manage several different technologies (mdadm for RAID, LVM, LUKS, …). I did that on my main rig and it turned out to be rather complex. Hence the switch to btrfs to at least squash a bit of complexity.
If you’d rather continue working with the storage technologies you know and avoid zfs, you may want to look into other OSs than TrueNAS (because that is zfs only). Two I’m running and can recommend are
- Open Media Vault: great for beginners (friendly, though dated-looking web UI), but Debian-based underneath and hence reasonably flexible if you know your way around the CLI, which you probably will. Case in point: mine is no longer just used as a NAS, but runs somewhere between 10-20 Docker containers, and I rarely touch the webUI these days.
- Proxmox: You mentioned VMs, so you’re probably familiar with this one. I like its flexibility, allowing me to run each VM tailored to its purpose: a NAS VM for network shares, a hardened, minimal VM for publicly available services and Wireguard access into the network, an LXC as a local DNS server…
I just bought a few WD drives direct, but their web site has a problem with validating virtual credit card numbers. I’m the few days it took to resolve it the price went up. Fortunately since I had the support ticket I was able to get refunded the difference.
Fuck AI
I recently checked on the price of the used 12TB server drive I bought a couple years ago. It was 80 then. It’s 260 now. Same seller.
I’m guessing you got similar drives to the ones I got. I paid ~$72 each (4x 12TB), and now the same HGST DC drives from the same seller are $220. Just glad I got them when I did, even though now I have to continually prune the data so it all fits within this forever limit.
Good idea. I just looked at a drive I bought six months ago and it’s up 40% or so. Wish I’d have got two now.
Bought a 20 TB external for ~$270 a few months ago. It’s now $400:
Three months ago I put two 20TB hard drives in my cart for $350 each. This week I had to pull the trigger on them and they were $420 each
1TB SSD I bought at the end of 2024 for $47 is $142 now
12TB HDDs were $104 a piece at the same time and are now $300 each.
I will absolutely remember the companies that are saying “fuck the consumer” when I go to purchase anything going forward.
Honestly which companies does that leave?
I think it has to be considered by degree of consumer-fucking. Some companies, like Micron, are outright discontinuing their consumer brands while others are ‘just’ deprioritizing consumers to chase the AI bandwagon.
It’s those companies’ prerogative to chase profits, but I’ll never buy another Micron product again if they ever decide to come crawling back.
Great point.
Buy used ETA: and prevent waste
I meant from individuals, not corporations with a profitable refurbishing outfit. e.g.: eBay, thrift shops, the swap shop at your local dump (if you’re lucky to have one), yard sales, etc.
One of my favorite things in life is rescuing hardware from the landfill, or bringing a relative’s dusty old machine back to life. There are still loads of people out there who have never opened a PC case before, and think the whole machine is a loss just because it won’t boot, or is “old”.
Wild that people were down voting you. Hard drives can last decades and are replaced from enterprise servers long before they’re close to failing.
Especially with lowered use compared to a server, you won’t see much functional difference between brand new consumer grade and used server grade.
Pretty sure caches and everything are better on used server grade still anyways.
For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise…
However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it.
It’s honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days…
Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.
So to clarify, what’s good is:
A product that was sent back to manufacturer and “manufacturer refurbished” meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it’s still working
Pretty much anything else, would be bad.
An example of what is bad is:
“Amazon/ebay refurbished” where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.
Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that’s where we can find deals.
I think I’ve got a 1TB that’s ~20 years old I got that way. It’s still technically in my main PC, but at this point it’s an unimportant archive drive that just doesn’t get read or wrote very often.
I’ve just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don’t know why people act like they’re disposable parts of a PC still.
My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base
Yeah, it’s just typical capitalism stuff.
People see talk about legit refurbs and then think a dust wipe refurb isnthe same thing and get ripped off.
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Yeah I’d imagine you’d have trouble finding a good deal there. I’ve had way more luck getting drives from eBay, thrift shops, yard sales and the local dump.
Also by convincing everyone I know to just give me their old stuff that they think is no longer useful. They don’t want it taking up space anyway, and I get to harvest the useful bits and add them to my frankensteined home lab, then responsibly dispose of the rest. There have also been several machines I’ve acquired this way that I’ve repaired/made whole again, then provided to those who need them.
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Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.
shit dude I’ll move my storage to S3 and retire on what I can get from my 16tb array and 20tb backup.
