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[personal profile] thewayne
Sigh.

So in addition to memory, solid-state drives, high-end video cards, now they're eating up hard drives. Some drives up up 60% in THE LAST FOUR MONTHS, according to a report from a German news source.

From the article: "The trend is also visible in the U.S. A Seagate IronWolf drive with just 4TB capacity would have set you back $70 in early 2023; that drive is now $99. Similarly, the 8TB model is $199, when it would have been priced as low as $130 a couple of years ago. Western Digital's Red Plus alternative is now $175 for 8TB. The toughest blow of all? Seagate's iconic BarraCuda 24TB drive, which we've seen cost as little as $239 during sales events, now costs a whopping $499 on Amazon, and you'll be buying it from a third party. Newegg doesn't even have it in stock."

Apparently there is a knock-on effect of people now building PCs with DDR4 memory instead of the latest DDR5 because all of that memory is being gobbled up by AI. So now older motherboards are in higher demands? AI server boards are specialized beasts and aren't the same thing that you're going to put in your gaming rig.

Apparently the hard disk drives are used to store the bulk data for training AI models, then all the operations are carried out on SSD arrays for speed. Makes sense, from a computer operations standpoint.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-percent-since-september-iconic-24tb-seagate-barracuda-now-usd500-as-ai-claims-another-victim

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/01/16/1332213/hard-drive-prices-have-surged-by-an-average-of-46-since-september

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