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WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026

https://www.heise.de/en/news/WD-and-Seagate-confirm-Hard-drives-for-2026-sold-out-11178917.html
82•layer8•1h ago

Comments

moomoo11•51m ago
Future show HN: how I managed to parallelize 100 tape drives to load windows and play video games
blackhaz•50m ago
VHS cassettes: maybe not so obsolete, after all?

Also, the Return of PKZIP.

baal80spam•46m ago
Stacker and Doublespace!
boobsbr•30m ago
memmaker and qemm
Keyframe•33m ago
Video Backup System for Amiga!
bravetraveler•51m ago
/dev/null as a service, mooning
lpcvoid•49m ago
But hey, we get slop videos of the pope doing something funny, that's just as cool as being able to purchase computer hardware, right?
littlecranky67•47m ago
To be fair, heise is a german news site, and the very article is auto-translated by AI from its german counterpart.
lpcvoid•24m ago
AI use for translation is a good fit for the tech. The problem is generative AI.
fnands•48m ago
Damn. First GPUs, then RAM, now hard drives?

What's next, the great CPU shortage of 2026?

geolqued•45m ago
yes https://www.reuters.com/world/china/intel-amd-notify-custome...
fnands•37m ago
Oh no, looks like my 8700k will have to hold out a little longer.
bilekas•31m ago
Better start hoarding Silica.
loeg•23m ago
I think hard drives was before RAM but it kind of all happened contemporaneously.
lccerina•46m ago
Everyone: things suck, better move my stuff on a small home server. The hyper-scaler mafia: NOT ON MY WATCH!

The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.

stingraycharles•38m ago
I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.

If it’s temporary I can live with it.

I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.

cube00•35m ago
>If it’s temporary I can live with it.

Given this has been going on for years at this point, the high prices of graphics cards through crypto and now AI, it feels like this is the new normal, forever propped up by the next grift.

dgxyz•14m ago
I don't think this ideology and investment strategy will survive this grift. There's too much geopolitical instability and investment restructuring for it to work again. Everyone is looking at isolationist policies. I mean mastercard/visa is even seen as a risk outside US now.
roysting•7m ago
Traps tend to only go one way.
b3lvedere•33m ago
The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.
ckbkr10•26m ago
> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.

No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.

dgxyz•25m ago
Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway.

Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.

icf80•45m ago
they’re pushing for AI, but nobody will have a device to use it?
FMecha•37m ago
I feel traditional "rust" hard disks would be inefficient for AI use. Unless they include SSDs (which I feel these data centers are more likely to be using) in the definition as well...
foxrider•27m ago
They need it hoard datasets.
Havoc•33m ago
Chromebook with a 64gig shitty eMMC is what Google and friends would love you to use. Pay that cloud drive subscription!
112233•20m ago
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embedding-shape•44m ago
I'll go against the grain and claim this might be a good thing long term. Yes, it sucks also, I was planning to expand my NAS but guess I'll figure out how to compress stuff instead.

Which goes into why I think this might be good. Developers have kind of treated disks as "oh well" with binaries ballooning in size, even when it can easily solved, and there is little care to make things lightweight. Just like I now figure out a different solution to recover space, I'm hoping with a shortage this kind of thing will be more widespread, and we'll end up with smaller things until the shortage is over. "Necessity is the mother of all invention" or however it goes.

altmanaltman•39m ago
Think that's more of a "silver lining" instead of the overall trend being a "good thing long term." It's still pretty terrible.
63stack•36m ago
There is an increasing chance the "invention" will be that nobody owns personal computers, and now has to rent from the cloud.
fnands•41m ago
First they came for the GPUs, but I did not speak out, for I was not a gamer.

Then they came for the RAM, but I did not speak out, for I had already closed Firefox.

Then they came for the hard drives, but I did not speak out, for I had the cloud.

Then my NAS died, and there was no drive left to restore from backup.

post-it•39m ago
It'll be fine. The supply chain for these components is inelastic, but that means once manufacturing capacity increases, it'll stay there. We'll see lower prices, especially if there is an AI crash and a mass hardware selloff like some people are predicting.
StopDisinfo910•35m ago
True if production capacity increases but it's an oligopoly and manufacturers are being very cautious because they don't want to cut into their margins. That's the problem with concentration. The market becomes ineffective for customers.
Maxion•33m ago
It's not about cutting in to their margins, if they end up scaling up production it will take several years and cost an untold amount of billions. When the AI bubble pops, if there's not replacement deman there's a very real chance of them going bankrupt.
cubefox•30m ago
> According to Mosley, Seagate is not expanding its production capacities for now. Growth is to come only from higher-capacity hard drives, not from additional unit numbers.
mrtksn•18m ago
If it takes 2 years to increase after 2 years everything will be thin clients already. Completely locked in, fully under control and used to it. Very dystopian TBH.
fastily•38m ago
If component prices keep going up and the respective monopoly/duopoly/triopoly for each component colludes to keep prices high/supply constrained, then eventually devices will become too expensive for the average consumer. So what’s the game plan here? Are companies planning to let users lease a device from them? Worth noting that Sony already lets you do this with a ps5. Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation
Maxion•32m ago
> Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation

That's when I sell of my current hardware and house, buy a cow and some land somewhere in the boondocks and become a hermit.

b3lvedere•31m ago
It could be a level up from that.

"You will use AI, because that will be the only way you will have a relaxed life. You will pay for it, own nothing and be content. Nobody cares if you are happy or not."

StopDisinfo910•26m ago
We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. There has been too many mergers in the component market.

You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and don't want to overcommit.

olavgg•38m ago
We aren't just dealing with a shortage; we're dealing with a monopsony. The Big tech companies have moved from being "customers" of the hardware industry to being the "owners" of the supply chain. The shortage isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out."

It is time to talk seriously about breaking up the hyperscalers. If we don't address the structural dominance of hyperscalers over the physical supply chain, "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

nubg•36m ago
Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment?

Why is this allowed on HN?

Maxion•35m ago
> Why is this allowed on HN?

1) The comment you replied to is 1 minute old, that is fast for any system to detect weird comments

2) There's no easy and sure-fire way to detect LLM content. Here's wikipedias list of tells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

bilekas•33m ago
> Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment?

How do you know that ? Genuine question.

f311a•28m ago
> isn't just "high demand", but "contractual lock-out."

The "isn't just .., but .." construction is so overused by LLMs.

hakanderyal•27m ago
It has Claude all over it. When you spend enough time with them it becomes obvious.

In this case “it’s not x, it’s y” pattern and its placement is a dead giveaway.

bayindirh•24m ago
Isn't this ironic to use AI to formulate a comment against AI vendors and hyperscalers.

It's not ironic, but bitterly funny, if you ask me.

Note: I'm not an AI, I'm an actual human without a Claude account.

A_D_E_P_T•16m ago
> “it’s not x, it’s y”

ChatGPT does this just as much, maybe even more, across every model they've ever released to the public.

How did both Claude and GPT end up with such a similar stylistic quirk?

I'd add that Kimi does it sometimes, but much less frequently. (Kimi, in general, is a better writer with a more neutral voice.) I don't have enough experience with Gemini or Deepseek to say.

Maxion•27m ago
To be fair, it is blindingly obvious from the tells. OP also confirms it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045459#47045699
lsp•21m ago
The phrasing. "It's not just X, it's Y," overuse of "quotes"
bombela•33m ago
It reads almost too AI to the point of being satire maybe?
olavgg•30m ago
It is my text, enchanced by AI. Without AI, I would never have used the word "Monopsony". So I learned something new writing this comment.
lpcvoid•25m ago
This behavior is part of the problem that got us here, using LLMs for everything.
smcl•25m ago
Come on man, you're a "founder" and you can't even write your own comments on a forum?
oytis•8m ago
I mean, we have just seen a pretty impressive exit of a one-person startup based on vibecoded software.
bilekas•19m ago
The irony is lost on you ...
badpenny•18m ago
You didn't write it. Here's another new word for you: hypocrite.
f311a•14m ago
You are losing your personality by modifying your text with LLMs. It saves you how much, 1 minute of writing?
derbOac•2m ago
Based on a few things, I think English might not be their first language and they're concerned about what they write. Maybe your point still stands but it was something that occurred to me after I was going to ask about it.
oytis•17m ago
LLMs learned rhetorical negation from humans. Some humans continue to use it, because it genuinely makes sense at times.
bilekas•33m ago
> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

This is the game plan of course, why have customers pay one time for hardware when they can have you constantly feed them money over the long term. Shareholders want this model.

It started with planned obsolescence, now this new model is the natural progression.. There is no obsolescence even in discussion when you're only option is to rent a service, that the provider has no incentive to even make competitive.

I really feel this will be China's moment to flood the market with hardware and improve their quality over time.

actionfromafar•2m ago
"I think there is a world market for maybe five c̶o̶m̶p̶u̶t̶e̶r̶s̶" compute centers.
AmazingTurtle•23m ago
"You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy"
ahsillyme•14m ago
> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

Yep. My take is that, ironically, it's going to be because of government funding the circular tech economy, pushing consumers out of the tech space.

shit_game•13m ago
This is the result of the long-planned desire for consumer computing to be subscription computing. Ultimately, there is only so much that can be done in software to "encourage" (read: coerce) vendor-locked, always-online, account-based computer usage; there are viable options for people to escape these ecosystems via the ever growing plethora of web-based productivity software and linux distributions which are genuinely good, user friendly enough, and 100% daily-drivable, but these software options require hardware.

It's no coincidence that Microsoft decided to take such a massive stake in OpenAI - leveraging the opportunity to get in on a new front for vendor locking by force-multiplying their own market share by inserting it into everything they provide is an obvious choice, but also leveraging the insane amount of capital being thrown into the cesspit that is AI to make consumer hardware unaffordable (and eventually unusable due to remote attestation schemes) further enforces their position. OEM computers that meet the hardware requirements of their locked OS and software suite being the only computers that are a) affordable and b) "trusted" is the end goal.

I don't want to throw around buzzwords or be doomeristic, but this is digital corporatism in its endgame. Playing markets to price out every consumer globally for essential hardware is evil and something that a just world would punish relentlessly and swiftly, yet there aren't even crickets. This is happening unopposed.

ta9000•36m ago
Save us, China.
phatfish•14m ago
It just goes to show how totally corporations have captured western aligned governments. Our governments are powerless to do anything (aside from some baby steps from the EU).

China is now the only solution to fix broken western controlled markets.

steve1977•33m ago
Time for some heavy regulation
tjpnz•18m ago
That's not going to happen when AI is already propping up a significant chunk of the economy.

There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott but not much coordination on targets.

newsclues•25m ago
I hope the data centres burn
Havoc•25m ago
Supply of 2nd hand enterprise stuff is also showing a slowdown. Seeing less of it show up in eBay
arjie•16m ago
I picked up a few hundred TB from a chia farm sale. Glad for it. I think I'm set for a while. Honestly, the second they started buying this stuff I started buying hardware. The only problem for me is that they're even ruining the market for RTX 6000 Pro Blackwells.
m4rtink•13m ago
Looks like we need a computer hardware reserves the same way there are regional reserves for food, fuels and other critical commodities?

And for the same reason - to avoid the dominant players going "oh shiny" on short term lucrative adventures or outright trying to manipulate the market - causing people to starve and making society grind to a halt.

zozbot234•9m ago
The real "computer hardware reserves" is the used market. Average folks and smaller businesses will realize that their old gear now has resale value and a lot more of it will be entering the resale/refurbishment market instead of being thrown away as e-waste.
cubefox•10m ago
I'm confused, that doesn't make sense to me:

> They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them.

What type of training data? LLMs need relatively little of that. For example, DeepSeek-V3 [1], still a relatively large model:

> We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens

At 2 bytes per token, that's 29.6 terabytes. That's basically nothing compared to the amount of 4K content that is uploaded to YouTube every day.

1: https://arxiv.org/html/2412.19437v1

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