28 TB $449.99 Price per TB: $16.07
For used༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
They’re not the victims… WE ARE. They’re giving in to the tech bros idiocy and catering to their wishes. If they any ounce of dignity as a honorable brand, none of them would have risen their prices. There’s literally ZERO actual reason for them to do this other than tech bros rigging it against the rest of us.
Noooooo!!
I just dreamt last night I had 2 more 28tb hard drives for my server to backup.
Now it’s a nightmare. Fuck AI!!!
Made me buy a used 10tb drive recently.
Screw them all, I will have a place for my data and I won’t pay them a dollar for these shenanigans.
I’ve got 30tb or so made up of 4 and 10tb used drives. All I’ll buy anymore. In fact, I need to change out of of my parity drives. Hopefully used market is still somewhat affordable.
In my country I got used 10tb for $150. Don’t know situation in your place.
I used to pay like $69 for them in the US. Looks like they add a hundred bucks or so to the price…
I will use a book shelf sized rack of RAID hubs filled with 1 GB flash drives before I buy a single fucking KB of cloud space.
I will install an ancient version of Linux on my mackie D8B soundboard and use that as my PC before I ever buy a goddamn cloud computer.
I would love to do that, but am scared of my house getting flooded/catching fire/getting tornado-ed/multitude of other things. Also, the electricity sometimes doesn’t work, especially now in winter and I need 100% uptime for remote data access
Backups and High Availability come to mind.
If there’s any other place you’d be allowed to install a second node on, ideally served by another ISP (since we talk about remote access), you can do that. This can be your friends, or family, or someone else you trust.
Just have 2 NAS devices with equal drives in each and let them work in a high availability cluster. This way, you’ll have near 100% uptime and a backup in case something goes wrong.
Sure, that is more expensive, but it gives some peace of mind while keeping control of your data. Additionally, with this configuration you don’t necessarily have to build a RAID array if money is a problem, so some costs can be shaved off (Though it never hurts to still have it if you can afford it)
An with my investments i really wanna cash in right now, i feel like the bubble is about to burst in the next 3-6months. Then stocks would go down by like 30% and i can buy in again.
Im almost certain its gonna crash down and i wanna be out before that happens but right now stocks just go up way to much.
Usually people advise against trying to time the market. Missing the down is one thing but if you miss the way back up then that is a lot of potential profit gone. Weathering the storm is typically the better option.
Glad I bought a bunch of 20 TB ones some months back. I’m good for a few years.
POP ALREADY!
It’s been a while since I bought storage. $500 for 24TB seems like a steal to me. Not that I have any need for 24TB. Also, I don’t trust Seagate drives. I’d rather have four, 6TB drives than one 24TB drive, but that’s just experience talking–I’ve lost several drives over the years, and most of them were Seagate. YMMV.
Less than a year ago 279 was a baseline price for 24tb
Man, i remember paying $300 for a 200gb ATA back in the day…
Honestly I don’t think it matters so much…
I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.
Nobody needs (that’s the crux term here, need, not “want” or “desire” or “wish”) a bigger hard drive. It’s the same way nobody needs an 8K TV and they they aren’t sold. Why?
I’m glad you ask, it’s all connected! If you stick to “just” a 4K TV, because you have normal human eyes, then the content you need is “just” 4K so a movie is just 2GB or so… and thus you don’t need a larger hard drive, thus not CPU, GPU, memory, etc. The current setup is simply “good enough”.
I can already hear the steps of that ONE person who edits 360 8K videos for National Geographic preparing to argue “actually…!” and yes, they ARE right. Some people, professionals, DO need super high res, super high framerate, super high everything … but that’s NOT your average consumer. You average consumer STOPPED upgrading because they need to. Most consumer who still upgrade mostly do it because of habit, because they get coerced into it (e.g. MicroSlop Windows 11) but not because they genuinely need to.
So… yes I “wish” I had better everything, including hard drive, but the truth is we “peaked” in terms of actually required spec a couple of years ago, same for phones that are now the same equivalent small slabs.
My point is I’m wondering if this AI bet will have deeper consequence for the industry overall with the realization for most people (again, please before you reply : your average consumer, the person who browse the Web, watch a video of a TV series, play some games for fun, NOT a professional!) that the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.
Get your point but most 4K encodings I see are ~10-20GB.
Another interesting metric is piracy trends, checking a popular show, e.g Fallout and its latest episode namely S02E05 :
- 1080p ~15k seeds
- 720p ~3k seeds
- 480p ~0.2 seeds
… and 2160p gets 50 seeds!
Of course that’s just 1 datapoint and it’d have to be replicated (maybe it was released after the other versions, maybe it’s a show people do NOT want in high res, etc) but it’s quite a big gap.
It’s already having deeper consequences, if their purchases affect RAM and storage prices, then it means it yields results better than half a year ago.
I agree about “good enough”. I felt that “good enough” moment in year 2006. In year 2009 even more. Some people remember Amiga Workbench of year 1999 stage as “good enough”.
I don’t think it matters which of these is closer to the equilibrium, we’ll learn empirically.
But I’m feeling better that it’s having a hard power redistribution from consumer sector to datacenter sector, that’s not a bad thing, because most of that consumer sector was based on the bullshit you are describing. It didn’t need to, but all the potent avenues of said sector’s development were strangled by RIAA, “protect the children”, “there are wrong people saying wrong things in the Internet” and other such pressures. And also by Steve Jobs and his idea that you don’t need ergonomics or usefulness, just a sci-fi look and a brand, I think that’ll take years to rectify, even though people are slowly getting tired of the “touchscreens are the future, physical buttons are fossil” narrative.
That bullshit drain means that we’ll have a better, healthier consumer sector eventually. And perhaps in 10 years or so something interesting will be happening there. Life is about change and movement.
You realise massive capacity hard drives were never meant for the average plebian, right?
They were always aimed at people with Certain Requirements and businesses. So saying that Average Joe ain’t buying a 28tb hdds isn’t a gotcha, it’s the norm
(Meanwhile my workplace is buying them like crazy. building a new DAS)
Right, sorry maybe I got a bit excited by my point. It wasn’t about this HDD example in particular, it was about the broader consumer hardware trend.
The problem with your argument is that while you can buy the lower res movie because you don’t need more and if a lower res doesn’t exist you can still watch the high res on your low res TV, you can’t choose to buy a lower install size game or software.
When you buy those, the size it is is usually what you will have to install to use it, and if you can’t buy a large enough storage to install it…
I’d be curious to know if game size is increasing over time. My intuition is that we also peaked at 200GB installs. There are bigger games but on average I’m not sure we installation size keeps on growing.
I think we reached peaked IT few years ago.
Yeah because nobody does IT innovation anymore. It’s all been put toward enshitification.
the hardware they have TODAY is good enough.
Then the prices of hardware TODAY are good enough. How the fuck does it not matter that prices are skyrocketing across the board for EVERYTHING both old and new?
I’m not arguing about prices. I wish prices would keep on going down but that’s just my preference as a consumer. It has nothing to do with my argument though.
I don’t know if it’s just because I’ve grown a bit over the last 15-ish years, but a computer also seems to perform better for longer now. My 1070 I bought in 2016 (I think?) was clearly starting to lack behind with newer games after 4 years. My current 3070, which is 4 years old now, just keeps performing in new games.
Interesting, I’m not sure if there is a metric for it, maybe Steam most popular configuration could be used then see if it’s average time does it indeed last longer? My intuition is it might indeed but I didn’t check the actual data.
Phew! I just bought three 16TB drives a couple of months ago for my jellyfin setup.
Selling them for $5000 each if anyone is interested.
Do we dare ask why you need 48TB to store media, or do we slowly back out of the room, avoiding eye contact?
Redundancy and high quality backups maybe? Some people have hoarded a lot of media over how many years, doesn’t seem too far fetched to me.
You had me at horded.
You. Had. Me. At. Horded.
AI has really been great for the economy. /s
Why… why would hard drives be going up in price?? AI does not use spinning platters of rust, like, at all.
Yes it does. Where do you think they store those gigantic training datasets?
relative to the hard drive market in general, that seems like a drop in the bucket. research labs like CERN write TBs per SECOND
quality data sets don’t even come close
They might write to faster storage first, then dump to slower larger storage afterwards
they might, but the point is the volume of data rather than the speed… CERN is obviously an outlier, but not by as much as you’d think. copious amounts of data is kinda par for the course in a lot of cases, and training data just doesn’t even come close to the volume of data that large data users produce (data warehouses/lakes in the order of PB and EB are not that uncommon)
Because the opposite is true. AI uses spinning rust far, far more than it does solid state storage.
My best guess is they want to use the raw materials on more profitable products. Kinda like how consumer PSUs are going up in price. The materials are being used for enterprise PSUs in the datacenter
Butlerian Jihad When?
It warms the cockles of my heart that I renamed my self hosted LLM’s deep thinking mode to Mentats. For shits and giggles, I made it append every “deep thinking” conclusion it makes with [ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN!].
It’s the simple things, really.
Are we really sure that AI is not just used as a scape goat for companies to raise prices?
Why HDDs?
All prices have been fake since the bailouts started.
It’s a cascade effect. Memory pricing went up -> Increased price of SSD with DRAM cache -> Increased pricing of DRAM-less SSDs after demand shifted -> HDDs became significantly more cost effective again as a storage device but now the demand for them increased so price went up for them as well.
2 months ago I’ve got Samsung 990 EVO Plus 4TB for 235€ now that’s the price of 2TB and the 4TB is almost 400€.
I’ve got 8TB Seagate Exos 7E10 8TB for 182€ in May now it’s almost 260€.
We’re fucked…
if you are looking at this from the US that is not necessarily the only thing that could be driving prices up though. You’ve got tariffs and a much weaker dollar than it used to be right now…
A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.
US prices are just EU prices + sales tax now
Storage capacity for datacenters and other data-hungry business operations (think YouTube scale).
Current alternatives don’t reach the same capacity per dollar without caveats (magnetic tape has an incredibly slow seek time and SSDs are too expensive for non-cache usage).
Of course, AI data harvesting is essentially creating artificial (sorry) demand for even more data capacity, and it doesn’t make rational sense for them to use other forms of hardware.
Fun fact - the scale of data involved is so great that Google famously used “sneakernets” (give an employee a backpack of hard drives and tell them to go from A to B) over traditional internet or intranet connections between their larger facilities in the 2010s, because it was faster.
The data used to create that image of the black hole had a transfer speed of 14GB/s because ~700TB of it was captured in Antarctica and spent 14 hours traveling by plane
Yeah right, if they’re buying thousands of terrabytes, I doubt they’re doing it in 1 TB HDD SATA drives.
The tools which make 1 tb HDDs also make bigger ones.
My understanding is the large AI companies sign purchase agreements with the manufacturers for X amount of drives. The manufacturers then take whatever chips/platters and build those drives. The AI companies have signed such large agreements that all the chips and layers are going to whatever drives they’re asking for and none left to make consumer drives.
They’re replacing us. Until now, corporations have obviously marketed to the working class, even the poorest of us. And they put in that effort, but now they’re moving past us bottom 90% of consumers and focusing on the top 10% and of course the ultra rich specifically. The top 10% of consumers already accounted for 55% of all buying power in Feb 2025, before tariffs, before the unnamed recession we’re in now, before the shutdown and mass firings.
So now you can imagine what that number is at, and you can see their thought process. It’s just not worth bothering to market and sell to us commoners.
Now, I think they’re stupid and I think they’re way too confident in something like the AI bubble, which will pop eventually. That being said, most new purchases (cars, clothes, electronics, ect…) are by the top 10%. They are gunning for our buying power and they are gunning for our labor power with AI. If they succeed, we will lose our two biggest bargaining chips. The ultra rich know this, and they hate that we have had any say over the economy.
If we’re gonna do this general strike, we gotta do it soon, because they are actively working to make action like that impossible.
They are working an infinite money glitch:
What if we were our own customers? Then we could charge whatever we wanted and just use the money from our dumb investors, and since we are also the producers we make a ton of money on the sales!
I work at a data center, and there are indeed big arrays of 1 tb sata HDDs. Although this isn’t for AI, our main clients are local companies and healthcare
The compone ts to make an HDD are almost the same though
Just in time for me to want to upgrade the home server storage.
I guess I’m gonna have to salvage old hard drives and deal with the tiny space.
Just finished ripping about 150 of our DVD collection and space was filling up, went looking for HDDs and was surprised at the prices. Now I know why.
I have an invention that… well, you be the judge; What if we take some cheap paper… and put holes in it ? If we place the holes in a certain way, they will resemble digits and we could store information via holes in a paper ‘card’ !!
No more ram/storage problems! …oh, and very organic btw !!
Hm, we probably need a family member to do the punching/reading of holes, but doable.
Whaddoyuthink - is it a killer invention or what ?
I’d like to see a single movie stored on punch cards. It would be massive.
Not to mention the time it would take to ingest that data
I just finished fixing my storage setup and was ready to add more… 😭
