such wrote on 2026-04-21, 00:00:

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-20, 00:13:

sunkindly wrote on 2026-04-19, 16:19:

I just noticed the same 4TB Samsung 990 Pro is now $1000 and I paid $300 for it last July. Holy crap. Did price increases hit SSDs worse than RAM?

Yes, because the AI bros need Nand storage for some reason, the likely reason is hoarding of current supply as the Fabs are not producing as much Nand as HBM is worth more and both ICs require the same production lines and materials to produce.

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently have while building so many more...

Anyway, it should also be added that HDD prices are getting silly at this point, and there's been some rumblings regarding CPU supply every now and then. Some GPU price increases, but not too bad all things considered. For now, at least.

This is the time to enjoy what you have. And to take very good care of it.

HDDS are a very different beast to SSDs in regard's to production and HDDs got hit hard with the war going on in the Middle East, they need helium to produce the enterprise level HDDs and with Israel being the majority producer of electronic grade helium, the supply of it is exceptionally stretched. Other countries supply helium but none of them can supply the capacity Israel was.

Im sure the AI bros have also reserved more spinning rust drives than they need and can actually use so that is also straining the already reduced supply.

Even the second hand enterprise drives on fleabay are affected by the price hike I see.

To think-- those 2 shelves of old SAS spinning rust I got for 600$ (SHELVES AND ALL) are actually valuable right now.
I just priced. Those things are going for like, 3k EACH right now. Jesus H Christ on a pogo-stick. That's a 5X increase in price for used trash. (actually 10X, since I got both shelves for 600. It would be 6K for both shelves now!)

wierd_w wrote on 2026-04-21, 02:58:

Even the second hand enterprise drives on fleabay are affected by the price hike I see.

To think-- those 2 shelves of old SAS spinning rust I got for 600$ (SHELVES AND ALL) are actually valuable right now.
I just priced. Those things are going for like, 3k EACH right now. Jesus H Christ on a pogo-stick. That's a 5X increase in price for used trash. (actually 10X, since I got both shelves for 600. It would be 6K for both shelves now!)

Yup most of the IT stores here are out of stock or have jacked prices so high you dont want to buy the drives and the secondhand market has been decimated as prices there are silly.

I still have 32GB kit NIB and 1TB SATA SSD and 1TB m2, sitting uninstalled, and 2 factory refurb 2TB 3.5" spindle drives, and a 8TB external, so is it time to stick them on eBay and start picking out a nice little mansion for retirement or what?

Though if you are buying stuff that would have seemed just a bit at the cheap end of normal price before craziness started, is there a fast and reliable way to verify real storage capacity? ... besides, you know, taking hours writing terabytes to it. Just that an electronics discount store nearby has had these 4TB external drives that look like they are 2.5s internally, for ages, but even a couple of years back there were fake capacity drives around.

For enterprise stuff, they often have a 520 byte sector for who knows what reason.

They can be reformatted with linux to 512 byte sectors, like normal, but the loss of 8 bytes per sector slowly builds up.

My 900gb sas disks are not fully 900gb after that reformat.

Once that's done, just get the max lba/max sectors from the drive using the appropriate linux tool.

(hdparm for sata and ide disks)
sudo hdparm -N /dev/sdX

(lsblk for sas)
lsblk -o NAME,MAX-SEC /dev/sdX

Take that, multiply it by 512 to get 'total size in bytes', then math your way to gigabytes / terabytes.

Edit:

OH. 'Fake drives'.

Hrm.. no. You need to write each sector, then verify each sector, to find where the backing medium 'really' ends. It's a sad day indeed when you must *use* such rubbish instead of burning it in a trashcan to save others the misery of encountering it!

Making RAM at home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6GWikWlAQA
Not DDR5, 😀 , but it's a start.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-21, 01:45:

such wrote on 2026-04-21, 00:00:

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-20, 00:13:

Yes, because the AI bros need Nand storage for some reason, the likely reason is hoarding of current supply as the Fabs are not producing as much Nand as HBM is worth more and both ICs require the same production lines and materials to produce.

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently have while building so many more...

Anyway, it should also be added that HDD prices are getting silly at this point, and there's been some rumblings regarding CPU supply every now and then. Some GPU price increases, but not too bad all things considered. For now, at least.

This is the time to enjoy what you have. And to take very good care of it.

HDDS are a very different beast to SSDs in regard's to production and HDDs got hit hard with the war going on in the Middle East, they need helium to produce the enterprise level HDDs and with Israel being the majority producer of electronic grade helium, the supply of it is exceptionally stretched. Other countries supply helium but none of them can supply the capacity Israel was.

Im sure the AI bros have also reserved more spinning rust drives than they need and can actually use so that is also straining the already reduced supply.

AFAIK HDD prices started increasing past reason before Iran, and WD announced they're booked for the year also before all that. My suspicion is what we're seeing right now isn't even properly reflecting the non-AI factors, save for perhaps a touch of panic buying.

I'm so glad I built my current Ryzen 9 9900X PC a year ago! My 32GB Crucial Pro DDR5 6000 kit was £71.99 from Amazon back then, now it's £349.99 for the same kit! I also paid £53.99 for a 32GB Crucial DDR5 5600 SODIMM kit a while back for my mini PC and that same kit is now £296.50!

There's also my various SSDs too that include drives from Crucial, Sabrent, Lexar and a lesser known Chinese brand called Fanxiang... They've all more than doubled in price! Needless to say, I'm not buying any modern hardware for a while until prices cool down a bit (if they ever do). Even GPU prices are absolutely ridiculous these days! I remember getting a GTX 980 Ti back when it was the best gaming GPU for £500 new and now the best gaming GPU (RTX 5090) will set you back around £3000+... I'm done if this is going to be the norm now.

On a more positive note, I just bought a nice condition Aopen AX6BC slot 1 board with a 700MHz PIII Coppermine CPU and some RAM for not too much 😎. This will be replacing my rev 1.03 Asus P2B-S that only supports upto a 600MHz Katmai PIII.

such wrote on 2026-04-21, 20:15:

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-04-21, 01:45:

such wrote on 2026-04-21, 00:00:

More than likely they reserved more than they actually need considering they can't power on whatever data centers they currently have while building so many more...

Anyway, it should also be added that HDD prices are getting silly at this point, and there's been some rumblings regarding CPU supply every now and then. Some GPU price increases, but not too bad all things considered. For now, at least.

This is the time to enjoy what you have. And to take very good care of it.

HDDS are a very different beast to SSDs in regard's to production and HDDs got hit hard with the war going on in the Middle East, they need helium to produce the enterprise level HDDs and with Israel being the majority producer of electronic grade helium, the supply of it is exceptionally stretched. Other countries supply helium but none of them can supply the capacity Israel was.

Im sure the AI bros have also reserved more spinning rust drives than they need and can actually use so that is also straining the already reduced supply.

AFAIK HDD prices started increasing past reason before Iran, and WD announced they're booked for the year also before all that. My suspicion is what we're seeing right now isn't even properly reflecting the non-AI factors, save for perhaps a touch of panic buying.

You are likely right which means we have yet to see the price jump from restricted helium supplies.

So basically everything is rising in price, often faster than wages, and some markets/products more than others due to specific sensitivities. thus stuff is more expensive to own, but i guess rentable, so how long before the idea of "owning" a computer becomes unusual, and just having pay monthly devices becomes dominant, speculative and fairly far off but now more plausible

i found this early 2025 report:

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025 … n-device-trends

i guess the trend is more pronounced now, while it doesn't answer the question owned v 'rented', i'd guess at ever increasing proportion of global mobiles being pay monthly

gerry wrote on 2026-04-22, 10:47:

So basically everything is rising in price, often faster than wages, and some markets/products more than others due to specific […]
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So basically everything is rising in price, often faster than wages, and some markets/products more than others due to specific sensitivities. thus stuff is more expensive to own, but i guess rentable, so how long before the idea of "owning" a computer becomes unusual, and just having pay monthly devices becomes dominant, speculative and fairly far off but now more plausible

i found this early 2025 report:

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025 … n-device-trends

i guess the trend is more pronounced now, while it doesn't answer the question owned v 'rented', i'd guess at ever increasing proportion of global mobiles being pay monthly

I don't think it's fairly far off, I think it's going to be pushed pretty soon. Get a thin laptop and rent your computing power. Look at what Nvidia and other companies are doing with game streaming. Just waiting to create the right moment to make the trap look good.

gerry wrote on 2026-04-22, 10:47:

So basically everything is rising in price, often faster than wages, and some markets/products more than others due to specific […]
Show full quote

So basically everything is rising in price, often faster than wages, and some markets/products more than others due to specific sensitivities. thus stuff is more expensive to own, but i guess rentable, so how long before the idea of "owning" a computer becomes unusual, and just having pay monthly devices becomes dominant, speculative and fairly far off but now more plausible

i found this early 2025 report:

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025 … n-device-trends

i guess the trend is more pronounced now, while it doesn't answer the question owned v 'rented', i'd guess at ever increasing proportion of global mobiles being pay monthly

Sounds like you wont own anything and youll be happy.

I already don't own anything, but I'm not happy.

A very interesting article, last updated in February of 2025:
https://www.eteknix.com/every-flagship-nvidia … or-inflation/5/

All prices are adjusted for inflation. The MSRP price of Rtx 5090 was essentially triple the MSRP price of Gtx 1080 Ti! And all of these was before the newest Gpu price increases of recent months, which is going to get much worse in the immediate future.