Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage

DO NOT assume SMART is reliable. You can wipe SMART stats or write any values you want.

You have to actually examine the real bits on the drive. Resellers don't want to take the time to actually zero a drive, they usually just nuke the partition table.

You also need to physically examine the drive. Corroded fingerprints on the PCB, wear on the port contacts, scratches from mounting rails, etc.

That's how it found out that the last "new" drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive. It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files. SMART, of course, reported it was a brand new drive with zero hours. Cleartext logs on the drive showed many thousands of hours of runtime.

Physical examination is the only reliable method.

Question for all of you more knowledgeble than I: can SMART data be tampered with? When I get, say, a refurbished Mac from Apple, I'm trusting Apple won't stoop to that. But a SSD vendor I've never heard of?

It’s a cartel just like the OPEC oil cartel.

Water? Clean Air? ROI?

Makes me wonder about the things that go into datacenters and power plants:

- Air conditioners

- generators

- Racks/Cages

- fire supression

- Concrete, Steel, power lines

etc

I have a hypothesis that it was AI, not COVID/sanctions/etc, that was mainly responsible for the 2020-to-ongoing "chip shortage." Ignoring companies with their own fabs (Intel) and companies with pre-existing reserved-capacity contracts with fabs (Apple), everyone else is stuck waiting in line behind batch after batch of fab orders from Nvidia.

Downstream of that, AI is effectively also responsible for the current generation of game consoles never declining in price.

Because game consoles are fixed platforms that continue to be manufactured over 5+ years, normally the most expensive parts in the system (the CPU and GPU) would gradually get cheaper to manufacture [and in turn, cheaper to buy] over the course of the console's lifetime—which was often passed onto the consumer in the form of the console's MSRP gradually decreasing. Either the process node for the console's silicon design would stay fixed, and demand for this process node would gradually decrease as larger fab customers move on to newer nodes, decreasing the (effectively auction-based) pricing for fab time on the older node; or the console manufacturer['s silicon vendor] would put their silicon design through a process-shrink, and so, while still paying top dollar for use of the fab's newest node, would be getting more chips per wafer out of that, and again could charge less.

But instead, what we've seen since the start of the AI boom is that there's no longer any price-reduced timeslots to be sold to manufacture the low-BOM parts for these price-sensitive console-maker customers. Instead, both Nvidia and AMD are now getting such high value out of even the older nodes, that 1. the fabs know they can squeeze them, charging full price for those slots as well; and 2. both Nvidia and AMD, in their roles as silicon vendors to the console makers, haven't been able to justify using (very much of) the time they're paying so much for to fab low-BOM-cost parts to fulfill their pre-existing outstanding purchase orders, when they could instead be fulfilling much-higher-margin new POs from the hyperscalers.

Thus every console of the ninth generation (PS5, Xbox Series, Switch) still selling for their launch price (with no help from process shrinks); thus none of these consoles having been able to be produced in excess of demand to the point that supply-and-demand ever drove retail prices below MSRP; and thus the only tenth-gen console so far, the Switch 2, taking ~4 years longer than anticipated to release†.

---

† Nintendo were very likely waiting for Nvidia to run off enough of the Tegra T239 with a sufficiently low passed-on fab cost, for Nintendo to both 1. be able to build a backstock and non-run-dry pipeline of Switch 2s, and 2. be able to be positive-margin on charging the same price as the Switch 1 for them. They waited four years, and neither thing ever happened; so they eventually just gave up and priced the Switch 2 higher, and also built out an entirely novel D2C + online-marketplace-partner distribution pipeline so they could ration the tiny initial supply of units they had been able to build with the chips Nvidia had supplied them so far.

Though, that being said, Nintendo actually got a double whammy here. They were also waiting for fast NAND to come down in price, so that they could have physical game cards manufactured for a trivial BOM price while still enabling the "direct GPU disk-streamed assets" pipeline that games of the last generation had begun relying on. Obviously, as today's article points out, that hasn't been happening either! Thus game key cards; thus SD Express cards only beginning to trickle out, with no sizes above 128GiB available at the Switch 2's launch time; and thus those SD Express cards being ridiculously priced for their capacity compared to equivalent transfer-speed + die-size NAND (as seen in e.g. low-profile/flush-mount flash drives.)

jobs...

Yes, but QLC has much higher density.

I think it's the higher density that makes it better for cold storage, which generally has infrequent access, and more reads than writes.

Hence the QLC's endurance being "sufficient for cold storage".

In short: Aggressive overprovisioning.

Enterprise SSDs are not expensive only because they have better flash chips, but they have much more of them.

A top of the line write oriented SSD comes with 4-7x more capacity than what it says on the tin, but that extra capacity is used for cell replacement rather than capacity itself.

Mixed use comes with 2-4x overprovisioning, and read oriented is around 2x IIRC.

Ssd for cold storage seems like an odd choice in itself. If that’s genuinely done due to availability then we really are in for a wild ride

Cold storage normally doesn't have frequent writes or frequent reads.

GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.

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?

If this bubble pops you might need that money for food when bananas go from $1.50 to $150.00

> This is a long term good thing. ... By 2028 or so we'll have a 50% drop in price-per-storage for these components.

Per the op:

> and the ongoing DRAM shortage is proof of this, with memory kits costing more than double what they did just a few months ago.

> While enterprise-grade QLC SSDs would entirely power this pivot, Sandisk has already raised NAND prices by 50%, according to another DigiTimes report, after initially warning of a 10% increase two months ago.

So you're basically saying prices may return to normal in two years, and that's somehow a good thing compared to them not being inflated in the first place?

> By 2028 or so we'll have a 50% drop in price-per-storage for these components.

Do you mean relative to six months ago, or now? Because a lot of the prices have already more than doubled.

(I’m upset because the computer I’ve been planning to build, which three months ago would have come to around ₹90,000, is now up to ₹1,20,000 and climbing week by week, half due to price increases on the same part, half due to forced substitutions on RAM since the cheaper 32GB 6400MT/s DDR5 sticks are completely unavailable. And looking into laptops, for the first time ever I’m seeing manufacturet SODIMM or SSD upgrades being cheaper than aftermarket.)

Will the AI bubble last until 2028? I’m still unclear how AI will return even 10% of this investment in profit.

The funniest thing about this is that, with high GPU prices, rising RAM costs, and now increasing SSD prices, Apple will end up producing the most affordable PCs.