Why HDD’s?
I thought LLMs ran on a fuckload of VRAM and thats pretty much it. So the GPU market was the main affected?
Note: Posted by the same media outlet that reported last week about the 9700X3D with zero fact checking
Ouch, I picked the wrong time to finally upgrade from my 12 year old laptop and Windows 7?
Just install Linux on it. My laptop is from 2011 and I’ve got bazzite on it and it’s been great. That should atleast get you through the bubble
Yeah but it’s a hardware issue that’s beyond my caring to try and troubleshoot. Random blue screens, memtest86 shows an error always at the same address no matter which sodimms I put or swap them around. I guess it runs until software enters that address range and blam! I think it might be power supply related at the board level, not the power brick. I don’t feel like changing capacitors at random, for all I know there might be voltage out of spec because a resistor value drifted.
Depends, is your choice of OS windows 10?
If so, you are fucked.
And what exactly has that to do with HDDs?
OP is upgrading FROM 12 yr old hardware during a time where hardware prices prices are rising due to a shortage of some components because AI data centers are demanding them.
Ok but what has that to do with HDDs??? Every normal Laptop nowadays comes with an M2 SSD…
AI crap. Infesting everything. Search of all kinds, photo management, telephone menus, who knows what else. And it does none of it well.
I don’t have issues with local AIs, for things like searching your local immich instance, or controlling your local Home Assistant devices. That photo of a bird you took 3’ish years ago? Yeah, you can find it in like three seconds with a local AI search. Want to turn the lights on with a voice request? AI is one of the easiest ways for a layman to handle the language processing side of things. All of that is a drop in the ocean.
But corporations have been trying to cram it into everything, even when it’s not a good fit for what they want to do. And so far, their solution to making it fit hasn’t been to rethink their usage and consider whether or not it will actually improve a product. Instead, their approach has simply been to build more and bigger data centers, to throw increasing amounts of processing power at the problem.
The technology itself isn’t inherently harmful on the small scale. But it has followed the same pattern as climate change. Individual consumers are blamed for climate change, and are consistently urged to change their consumption habits… When it’s actually a handful of corporations producing the vast majority of greenhouse emissions. Even if every single person drastically changed their emission habits, it would barely make a dent in the overall production. It was all because of massive astroturfed PR campaigns to shift the blame away from those companies and onto individuals. And we’ve seen that same thing happen with AI, where individual users have been blamed for using AI, instead of the massive corporations.
Think of all the cheap hardware being resold when the AI bubble pops.
There wasn’t as big of a price drop as I thought there would be when the crypto mining switched to ASIC from GPUs. Don’t know if all that hardware just got dumped or is sitting in a rack rotting somewhere. Hope that we get cheaper prices when the bubble pops, this artificial scarcity sucks.
Hope that we get cheaper prices when the bubble pops, this artificial scarcity sucks.
Not likely. Why would they give up money?
Yeah. I know. Wishful thinking.
Dare to dream ✊
Immich does photo management pretty well.
I think your sentiment and the back end requirements of AI is a big downfall of it, as while your sentiment has validity in many public facing deployments of it there are some things it is actually succeeding at. I speak from experience having used it for several specific use cases which it excels at, but you and others probably don’t have time nor care that this is true. And again marketing idiots out weight the deliberate approach that engineers and others might want, much less the economy might need.
cases which it excels at
Uhuh
Like how my colleagues often come to me saying they fixed it with Cursor and when I check the UI where the bug was, the page doesn’t even load at all now.
I just had someone tell me they did something with AI and when I checked they didn’t even get right the very basic thing of coding around the right controller names. The fucking names were wrong. They didn’t even check the feature, they just shipped, called it fixed, and told me Cursor figured it out really quickly.
I’m tired of this. I’m REALLY tired of this, man…
Preaching down to folks who already have a good reason to hate your product is a good way to join that pile
Having done my research, and tried it, I’m not an ignorant F*** as I read and engage at least. You just like being a troll.
Man go fuck yourself
I posted this as a perspective on AI that is not given by AI, nor by someone who believes it will stay this way, but nor am I promoting it. I believe it’s more nuanced that just being crap, although it is taking over many things in life. I have used it, I know how to use it for good (keeping it private, local, and to help teach reasoning as well as do the thing that we need done (like dishes, bills, and other bullshit). I’m fully aware it’s a bubble (14 billion to 1.4 trillion for OpenAI alone), dislike it and hate the energy waste. You all just seem to want to keep up the ignorant web user stereotype.
Have fun down voting something you don’t really understand.literally no one is saying “we need to kill all pursuits of ai because it’s bad at organizing my photos”
The copium is hard with them innit?
Remember a year or so ago when they all spun down production so they could charge more money for drives? I do.
TL;DR
QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.
In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, they need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).
So moving to QLC in cloud application comes with mid and long terms costs in terms of power usage and, more importantly, drive end-of-life and replacement.
–
Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.
Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide to which digital value that analog value actual maps to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain range aroun the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.
(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal - this by the way is why if you make the line between a sender and a receiver digital chip too long, many meters, or change the signals in them too fast, hundreds of MHz+, without any special techniques to preserve signal integrity, the receiver will mainly read garbage)
So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signal or due cell damage from repeat writes, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.
All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use causes that what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than when written).
Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what’s stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that’s mainly read only (for flash memory, writting uses way more power than reading), the endurance problem is much worse for QLC because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC for data that is frequently written (wear-leveling exists to spreads this effect over all cells thus giving higher overall endurance, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC so it does not improve the endurance of QLC).
First outrageous DDR5 RAM prices now ssd’s.
Welp. Won’t be upgrading my pc for the next few years I see
and hard drives too, right?
I need to get around to maxing out my DDR4 rig before those prices skyrocket too.
deleted by creator
This collapse when we only need 1/100 of what they are planning. Because not everyone is going to need a massive data center. Just like cars, computers and every other technology. It starts out diverse than shrinksssssssss.
Just thinking about all the electronic waste this is gonna generate is making me feel all icky
The good thing about large businesses is that they don’t typically throw hardware in the garbage, especially drives. They’ll most likely either sell the wiped drives to a recycler/refurbisher, or donate them to a charity that does the same for the tax write-off.
This is one of the rare instances where being profit driven is helpful.
I worked in the surplus warehouse for a university, and all of their computer equipment went to a local prison with a program that has inmates refurbish them and gives them to schools in low income areas. The stuff that can’t be refurbished gets recycled.
Now may not be a good time to tell you about the Windows 10 EoL that recently lapsed, then.
Think about all the HDDs that they will sell for cheap in 5 years.
I’m not really ever in the market for drives with forty thousand power on hours, are you?
I am no expert. What wears the drive down? Depending on the workloads the drives could be ok.
That might be a silver lining, but I also see a high possibility of companies just throwing everything onto a big pile of garbage or shipping it to fuck knows where instead of dealing with the hassle of reselling their no longer needed assets.
Will they even by allowed by the contracts to resell them?
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you
But I bought only once HDD 😞
Oh for fucks sake… I wanted to expand my NAS… Crypto was (is still responsible) for the shit state of the GPU Market and now it’s the next scam.
Just got 12TB IronWolf last week for an average price if 260euro. Delivery is long but other than that, price is average.
Checked just right now - average 310euro for the same HDD. From the place I picked mine - 293. SCORE!
Thinking about this for a minute - that’s probably pre-Black-Friday prices. We’ll see
Imagine how I feel right now, I bought 16 used 20tb Seagate drives around September last year for $200 each, from Amazon, and finally built my dream NAS after a decade of waiting and planning. I don’t understand how I got so lucky but I did. They’re all working just fine, and I somehow avoided having to wait another decade to finally build my NAS due to random capitalism gold rush bullshit. Praise be.
Is IronWolf a website?
No. It is a HDD model of a brandSeagate that is designed to be used in NAS and such.
i just bought an 8tb drive a couple weeks ago with zero issue
RAID5, don’t fail me now!
As a PSA: depending on your needs (bcs I see a lot of simple homelabs RAIDing), consider second server or even second location simple snapshot backup vs same-machine duplication.
Like, which would you want to set up first depending on your specific risks profile.The later is like like a proper backup, the former more of a low-downtime strat (that most smol homelabs can do without - “just wait a day, mom”)
Eg as the most basic example - instead of local duplication you could have a small PC (even like some old Pi), big HDD, and rsync once a day.
(Ofc, with duplicated serves, finances permitting, you can also provide backup services which helps that downtime issue. And by finances I mean the rest of your server group stuff, which in my cases is mostly HDD cost anyways.)
Got it!*
*puts a Timeshift partition on the same RAID array
Lol (but ppl do that).
So, if the AI bubble pops, it’ll be a great time to build a PC
I’ll pray for this outcome, I need something that can actually run Unreal(requirements) Engine 5 games
Wish I could confidently say that it is going to pop soon, but I am not sure the current rebound is the bull trap. Maybe the correction was just a small blip in a huge bubble…
I thought similar during the GPU crypto mining phase. There’s always something blocking cheap PCs.
There are a lot of “refurbished” drives from when the Chia bubble popped (a useless shitcoin that wasted HDD space with garbage data as a proof of cryptographic work)
Data storage devices are the last items you wanna buy second hand though. A drive failing could mean much more than just having to buy a new one.
HDDs used for chia mining or similar shitcoins have been used for just a full wipe to create the huge rainbow table or whatever the shitcoin needed and then left on idle with very little read activity for years
It’s not the typical “end of life” server HDD with 80k hours of 24/7 full use
This makes me think: if chia and similar coins simply generated the monopoly money by “finding the right numbers on the right rainbow table” … were they a covert way for some government to have a distributed decryption network? Especially thinking how popular it was in china
Not really. Wrong type of math, not practical to reuse to break cryptography. There’s similar techniques that can be used against some algorithms, but not when set up like that.
Used enterprise drives are amazing value though. With enough redundancy in a RAID array it’s a great way to get storage in bulk.
Like there won’t be some other hype to immediately take it’s place. Just like Bitcoin GPU prices never collapsed because it went right into AI hype.
AI messed up GPU prices even before AI was really a thing. When everyone was caught up in the Bitcoin hype, Nvidia already focused completely on AI instead of banking on the crypto hype, neglecting consumer GPUs. And we still feel that today.
Im seeing a pattern here (capitalism)
The next hype lined up is quantum
Fortunately they won’t need most normal PC hardware for this. At least not CPU’s and GPUs AFAIK.
“Quantum emulation” all the hype, 1/1000th the efficiency, 1000X the excuses to sell hardware
I was about to post this, but call it virtualized quantum.
It’ll probably just be LLMs claiming to have the same probability as a quantum calculator and just spit out made up primes so long we wont be able easily check them.
Tbf Bitcoin didn’t fuck with the GPU market, that was more etherium’s doing
Bitcoin trashed the GPU market before moving on to Asics. Then other coins kept going on GPUs.
That was barely a year or two. Bitcoin wasn’t very popular globally speaking when the first ASICs already was in development, and in between the two there was FPGA mining
Hadn’t bitcoin not been viable on GPUs for over a decade? Most of the cryptocurrency hype was mining other coins on GPUs, or using them to do blockchain calculations for NFTs and things.
Til. I’ve only ever seen the application specific boards for Bitcoin.
Which is even sadder because Ethereum has always been a trash coin.
Why? And which coins are good?
Ethereum formally introduced the concept of smart contracts, and they had serious potential for modernizing financial contracts and push back an entire predatory industry of leechers, but instead it was used to create meme-coins and scam coins and ruined it all.
It’s move to proof of stake instead of proof of work dramatically reduced its energy usage, and makes it a actually scalable, but the masses lost interest when they couldn’t just make money off a few GPUs and turned to the aforementioned shit-coins built on the Ethereum network.
Ethereum is not bad, it’s one of the better ones. It’s just kind of responsible for the explosion of shit/scam coins, because people are shitty scammers.
The explosion of scam coins was basically inevitable, it’s what you get with zero regulation.
the masses lost interest when they couldn’t just make money off a few GPUs and turned to the aforementioned shit-coins built on the Ethereum network.
Most of the shit meme coins are on Solana.
Does Solana benefit from that?
The shitcoins were a thing also without ethereum, there was even a shitcoin generator website, pay 0.1 BTC (when it was worth like $100), upload your icon, choose the name, and download the compiled clients for mining that shit
Nope. China vs. Taiwan at the horizon. They really want that island back. It won’t be good for world peace and really bad for EUV-lithography (TSMC).
China vs. Europe and China vs. US are topics, too. Hopefully limited to economic pressure.
There’s always the second hand market…
back
The current mainland China gov never had any real claims to it. The argument they use is the same as for why they believe they have the right to enforce Chinese law on Chinese people abroad, including having their own secret police in other countries, etc, they simply don’t accept being anything less than the sole authority and sole representative for everybody they consider to belong to any ethnicity which is “theirs”. The claims on the island doesn’t really have much to do with the island, but that it’s populated with people they consider theirs.
*Home server farm.
When the AI bubble pops we’ll all be too broke to buy any PC anything.
The Buffett Index, America’s total stock valuation vs. GDP, is at 200%. It was around 130% in 1929, 2000 and 2007. Guess what? Chicken butts. (is what we’ll all be eating)
THIS is what I’m looking forward to. I’m guessing it’ll start sometime next year, so shortly after Christmas '26 will be the optimal time -at least that’s my long-term plan.
Be a great time to set up RAID storage systems (or whatever I’m not that techie) mmmmmmm I cannot waaaaait to have something resembling a backup.
Required message that “raid is not a backup [solution]”, it’s an uptime and recovery system.
My primary server uses raid along with snapshots, full local backups, and off-site backups for critical data to two different cloud providers on different continents.
My second server backups images to the primary. My vps also backups to the primary. Both get the raid and snapshot treatment, and local, but not cloud. Gaming servers, boinc, and home assistant aren’t ‘critical’ :p
What else are these data centers going to hoard?
Jobs, GPUs, water, hard drives
Electricity
Ironic Microsoft doesn’t have enough electricity to power their hoarded gpus.
Land.
Privacy
Jet engines.
I’ve been waiting over a month for my MicroCenter to restock Western Digital 14-16 TB HDD to upgrade my NAS. I finally caved and ordered direct from Western Digital. It still took them 10 days to ship the order.
Seagate drives continue to remain in stock but i’d like to reduce my chances of premature drive failures.
Not sure I trust WD after the whole lying label NAS thing, the wiped drive accident, and more.
those are interesting links. I just went off of backblaze reports for hdd failures, and it looked like Western Digital had some of the best results
At some low-failure-rate point the risks of those ‘couple of drives’ you would own don’t really mean much difference in irl probability of failure.
Def good info to avoid high-failure-rate drives tho.
Oh this must be for
trainingstolen dataWhen it all comes crashing down, at least the Internet Archive could have easy & cheap access to it all. I trust them to handle it more responsibly than the AI bros.
There is nothing short of non-fascistic government-forced bankcrupcy sell off that will actually make it cheap, so… I feel it is a pipe dream
