WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026 (heise.de)

Future show HN: how I managed to parallelize 100 tape drives to load windows and play video games

/dev/null as a service, mooning

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?

Damn. First GPUs, then RAM, now hard drives?

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

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.

they’re pushing for AI, but nobody will have a device to use it?

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.

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.

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.

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

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Save us, China.

Time for some heavy regulation

I hope the data centres burn

Supply of 2nd hand enterprise stuff is also showing a slowdown. Seeing less of it show up in eBay

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.

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.

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

Do the guys that buy out the market have real use for all the hardware - or is it just hype? A solution against investors trying to corner the market would be to sell virtual hardware. Let them buy as much options on virtual "to be delivered" hardware" as they want. We also need an option market for virtual LLM-tokens, where the investors can put all their money without affecting real people.

There hasn't been a better time in the past 15 years to push for a new video or image codec. Saving storage Space is important again.

This is assuming most of what we stored are either images or video.

No one can be surprised to see that all of these artificial "shortages" are impacting components with monopoly or few actors producers...

Repairability, upgradability and standards compliance needs to be minimum in consumer products. No to proprietary connectors. No soldered SSD or RAM. For home use, allow relaxed licensing options for discarded enterprise products like switches, Wifi Access Points etc. (Juniper Mist APs are fantastic, but are a brick without their cloud). Currently, I cannot put in a market bought SSD in my Macbook. I cannot put in a SSD in my Unifi router without buying their $20 SSD tray. I cannot put third party ECC-RAM and SSDs in my Synology NAS because the policy has only been lifted on HDDs but nothing else. I fear opposite will happen. Only leveraged companies have access to DRAM and NAND and hence will use it to lock us into their ecosystem as consumers won't even get access to storage in the open market otherwise.

After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans?

In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.

As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.

So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.

I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.

As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.

They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.

That is free market at work right?

In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects. Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.

So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?

Previously:

Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47034192