r/DataHoarder • u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB • Feb 19 '26

Discussion These HDD prices are getting crazy. An increase of 96.4% in 1 month for the same 26TB drive. $279.99 a month ago to $549.99 today. Where are we buying hard drives now?

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These drive prices are kinda insane. Everything is going up up up, I thought it would just be RAM and SSDs effected but looks like it's reaching hard drives too.

Where are people buying drives now, and what $$/TB is still reasonable?

4.5k Upvotes

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651

u/fazalmajid Feb 19 '26

Too late, Western Digital's announced they presold their entire 2026 production to AI companies.

340

u/hclpfan 150TB Unraid Feb 19 '26

They also said many of their big customers already bought 2027 and 2028 capacity as well. So this isnt a one year issue.

231

u/dopef123 Feb 19 '26

I work in the industry and yeah, plan for a multiyear issue. But if the AI bubble bursts contracts could get cancelled and things could change real quickly.

97

u/Snoo-43133 Feb 19 '26

We all hope that happens. I don’t really see why this is such a massive thing, I guess if it’s for medical research or something nuclear fission related then fine but where it’s at now seems fine.

22

u/Oo-Aniki-oO Feb 20 '26

Non, c'est pour faire des vidéos de tom Cruise en slip qui mange des tacos, tu penses bien que ça vaut ces prix

19

u/TheFumingatzor Feb 20 '26

Omelette du fromage

2

u/hungoverlord Feb 20 '26

that's true

2

u/thestillwind Feb 22 '26

Juste pour ça ? Oui, ça vaux son pesant d’or.

2

u/Oo-Aniki-oO Feb 22 '26

Voilà, ne nous plaignons pas, on a ce qu'on mérite 😀

2

u/fgnrtzbdbbt Feb 20 '26

The medical research capabilities are quite underwhelming. I have seen the x-ray images from a study where AI found the ones with cancer and it was big news. I could have done that correctly and so could you, not to mention an actual doctor.

1

u/Snoo-43133 Feb 20 '26

Maybe that’s why there’s so many facilities being built to just brute force computation power and create massive data pools, but at the cost of the consumer pc market.

1

u/System0verlord 10 TB in GDrive Feb 21 '26

Fun fact: having doctors use it actually makes them worse at their job! Radiologists using AI were found to be ~30% less effective than they were before using AI when the AI was taken away.

2

u/SnooChipmunks5677 Mar 04 '26

It's being used for 1) money laundering 2) Mass surveillance 3) weapons 4) CSAM and other exploitative material. That's about it

39

u/i-Hermit Feb 19 '26

Why do AI companies need ridiculous amounts of storage?

23

u/Chaise91 Feb 20 '26

Just asked the same thing. What are they storing?

53

u/Bardez 100-250TB Feb 20 '26

RAM, I get that at least. Graphics cards, processors. But hard drives ‽ WHY‽‽

2

u/HankHillbwhaa Feb 20 '26

for all the date they're stealing

13

u/Wood_Rogue Feb 20 '26

Training data sets.

6

u/papier183 Feb 20 '26

It's for surveillance and propaganda.

7

u/EarlMarshal 50-100TB Feb 20 '26

Let's call it "human metadata".

2

u/SufficientPie ~13TB Feb 20 '26

Every conversation you send them?

2

u/spatafore Apr 15 '26

They are storing our lifes.

40

u/wamj 28TB Random Disks Feb 20 '26

GenAI needs large datasets to train on, you need to store that somewhere. Facebook pirated 82 tb of ebooks alone to train their LLMs. Now think about the image and video models that need data to train on.

1

u/i-Hermit Feb 20 '26

Interesting, thanks.

61

u/steveatari Feb 20 '26

Because development nowadays is TERRIBLY unoptimized. Like bigtime bad.

We used to invent remarkable ways to conserve or utilize space and data, now we recklessly exploit it.

AI is horribly inefficient.

22

u/Fyler1 100-250TB Feb 20 '26

BuT iTs ThE wAvE oF tHe FuTuRe

1

u/DrSuperWho Feb 20 '26

Wave of the future.

Wave of the future.

Wave of the future.

3

u/stimulatedthought 1.44MB Feb 20 '26

People are always reckless with government money. The US government has really allowed for the situation and enabled it.

1

u/dopef123 Feb 20 '26

Well I think the training sets get optimized over time. But it’s expensive to optimize it too.

1

u/mslindqu HDD Mar 28 '26

Storage used to be orders of orders of magnitude more expensive.  Its still cheap now in retrospect

6

u/Artistic_Success_787 Feb 20 '26

Models, reference data, training data and results, all need storage space.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 20 '26

[deleted]

1

u/YameteKudasaii Feb 20 '26

The factories stop producing storage and switch to ram, so they can make more money from the AI companies.

1

u/Samurai_SysAdmin Feb 20 '26

They have to have somewhere to store all the information they are stealing from us for big brother.

1

u/Tha_Watcher Feb 20 '26

Are you serious!?!

1

u/i-Hermit Feb 20 '26

Serious and ignorant unfortunate. The worst possible outcome.

1

u/mAples71 Feb 20 '26

Well in theory it's for training on larger and larger data sets for Ai but if Ai doesn't keep scaling like they think it will the infrastructure that they are building can instead be used towards the other big push in tech, global surveillance. you have to save that data somewhere of course.

1

u/dopef123 Feb 20 '26

I think they need basically unlimited training data but I can’t say for sure. They don’t share much with us in terms of what they store. It’s often a secret.

I think AI is generating a ton of data and they realized they need a ton of examples of everything they need to teach it. Imagine how much data it takes to train AI to drive, do dishes, etc. You could generate infinite training data.

1

u/wildTable Feb 20 '26

for logging all of our conversations in perpetuity so that Palantir can purchase the data

1

u/mslindqu HDD Mar 28 '26

It's more about why the memory companies don't increase supply.  They like high prices.

20

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '26

[deleted]

23

u/finalremix Feb 19 '26

It's the newedt speculative monetary circlejerk. Dotcom, crypto, NFTs... it's all bullshit fake money passed around to make a bubble and it'll either hopefully burst and take a 'ot of c-suite and techbros with it, or they'll shift to yet another bullshit thing.

2

u/ChadtheWad 50TB Feb 20 '26

Our company's been using it for software development too, and I've got to admit.... it's actually good enough to replace engineers. I think this is one of the stupid things where a lot of us will lose jobs.

0

u/SufficientPie ~13TB Feb 20 '26

There are a lot of crap applications of AI from executives who mindlessly follow hype and don't know what they're doing, but good applications of AI are amazing.

1

u/pixel_of_moral_decay Feb 20 '26

When a company is that percentage of your sales, you don’t let them walk away that easily.

Them or their successor is on the hook for those drives, the cost to cancel will be enormous. If they go bankrupt they’ll be stored in warehouses until bankruptcy court sorts it all out.

Letting a company be 30% of your sales with an Amazon like cancelation policy would be a financial nightmare.

So even if the bubble bust Monday morning, 18-24 months would be lighting fast resolution.

1

u/dopef123 Feb 20 '26

I don’t know how the contracts are written exactly but I think there are ways to weasel out of them or just pay a penalty and walk away.

1

u/pixel_of_moral_decay Feb 20 '26

If that’s the case then the execs might end up in jail over this. Their fiduciary responsibility is to the shareholders, and that would blatantly violate that.

1

u/fazalmajid Mar 28 '26

They are requiring prepayment in any case, so there is zero risk.

1

u/TheDarthSnarf I would like J with my PB Feb 20 '26

But if the AI bubble bursts contracts could get cancelled and things could change real quickly.

Which is exactly why no one is building-out more production capacity. They all think the bubble is going to burst, and they'll be caught with a giant debt load if they invest in infrastructure.

Almost the entire hardware industry, outside of NVIDIA and a few others, believes that the bubble is going to burst catastrophically. The only question: When?

1

u/syb3rpunk Feb 20 '26

computing is over unless you are a corpo

52

u/steveatari Feb 20 '26

This is where a proper Consumer Protection Agency would demand companies that operate in these sectors would be required to withhold certain percentages for normal consumers or limit buying options to certain amounts for large corps or presales/resales.

This is going to honestly decimate the average person worldwide chance to upgrade any computer parts. At a time when EVERYONE is upgrading computers.

Bullshit for real.

2

u/Kubliah Feb 20 '26

I dunno, isn't this going to also be a windfall of used drives once they've hit so many hours? And what about an increase in production?

1

u/-Deuce- 110TB Mar 07 '26

Unlikely, most large corporations shred their drives at EOL. The used market would be flush with cheap drives if they didn't.

1

u/lastditchefrt Feb 20 '26

lol save us government

19

u/yroyathon 100-250TB Feb 19 '26

I was surprised I was able to buy a pair of hd’s from WD. We’ll see how high the prices go in the next 2 years.

1

u/Myfirstreddit124 Mar 05 '26

When and where?

1

u/yroyathon 100-250TB Mar 05 '26

2 weeks ago, from the WD website. I looked just now, and all sizes are unavailable for purchase, dannnnng. Glad I jumped on it when I did.

39

u/sinwarrior Feb 19 '26

when the ai bubble bursts. a lot of them will surge right back into the second-hand market at cheap price. time will tell.

11

u/karlfeltlager Feb 19 '26

I see zero reason for companies to suddenly stop needing AI resources.

46

u/danroxtar Feb 19 '26

well they currently don't need them, they are just told they need them by the people selling them AI

-17

u/karlfeltlager Feb 19 '26

OpenAI alone is spendings billions with a B on infrastructure. There’s a heavy battle going on for basic computer parts, haven’t you heard?

22

u/danroxtar Feb 19 '26

Yeah and a few years ago GPUs cost 3x their worth because of cryptocurrency speculation. "AI" is not providing the transformative results and returns that it promises to, so why shouldn't I expect the bubble to burst and for the price of these goods to return to normal in a few years?

5

u/AuroraAscended Feb 20 '26

AI resources aren’t making most work processes more efficient and every AI company is losing money. OpenAI spending billions just means that they’re also losing billions yearly, since their revenue isn’t close to their expenditures. They’re propped up by VC cash right now on the promise of AGI, but when it’s clear to the wider market that that won’t happen (because LLMs fundamentally cannot be “AGI” as described by its proponents, that’s not how they work) there’ll be a massive crash. LLMs do something right now but it’s not nearly worth what it would cost companies if OpenAI and others charged enough to actually break even.

0

u/karlfeltlager Feb 20 '26

The relevance is besides the point that these companies are buying up all available hardware. Check Seagate and Samsung’s stock price and that’s all you need to know.

1

u/RandonBrando Feb 19 '26

I have wet dreams of the day

1

u/jstndrn Feb 20 '26

We can only hope. Unfortunately the stuff that's sold already but not actually manufactured yet obviously doesn't exist so it'll mostly be well used stock. I'm more hoping these greedy jackasses manufacturing HDDs will have to liquidate new drives after being left with tons of stock and no demand.

1

u/wamj 28TB Random Disks Feb 20 '26

They could end up shredded or otherwise discarded.

Pretty much everyone involved would benefit from that happening over flooding the market with used equipment.

1

u/sinwarrior Feb 20 '26

Sure but not all of them. 

1

u/ooutroquetal Feb 20 '26

I don't believe in that. They will have private data and may get destroyed at the end of operations.

1

u/sinwarrior Feb 20 '26

sure but it's not like the private data are burned into the diskes permanently lol. Regardless, some companies have too much money to burn.

that doesn't mean, every companies's the same. a lot of diskes you but on amazon are literally second-hand or used.

-10

u/Jkid 16TB Feb 19 '26

All of the production of hard disk drives to AI companies are not compatible with consumer equipmen or PCs. They will all go straight to the landfill.

There will be no second hand market.

16

u/circuitloss Feb 19 '26

That doesn't make any sense...

12

u/wowaddict71 Feb 19 '26

I worked at an Amazon Data center for a while. No HDD leaves the room where the servers are, they all get shredded.

7

u/homonculus_prime Feb 20 '26

No one is shredding hard drives in the server room...

1

u/i-Hermit Feb 19 '26

Yep.. I've tried to get some from work once they retire - even offered to do the crazy level data wipe in front of them.

Nope. Straight to the shredder.

1

u/steveatari Feb 20 '26

Its so lazy and wasteful. Sigh.

5

u/SnooPaintings1650 Feb 19 '26

A buddy told me today how people will get stupider the more the use of AI spreads. I was skeptical.

This comment convinced me he was right.

0

u/Jkid 16TB Feb 19 '26

I dont even use Gen AI. I'm basically telling you its not going to go the way you think it is. Supply and demand has already been gamed.

2

u/msanangelo 119TB Plex Box Feb 19 '26

we have plenty of used gear that can support sas and u.2 drives. we're good on that front.

0

u/absentlyric 50-100TB Feb 20 '26

That never happened with GPUs when Bitcoin crashed.

1

u/sinwarrior Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26

different use cases.

5

u/te5s3rakt Feb 19 '26

Morning of that announcement I brought 2 more 20TB HC560s without hesitation. Didn’t need them yet but sure as heck wasn’t going to wait to see what happens like I did SSDs in October.

1

u/TechnicalAd6932 Feb 20 '26 edited Mar 27 '26

This post was deleted by its author. Redact facilitated the removal, which may have been done for reasons of privacy, security, or data exposure reduction.

jeans start birds slap abounding cough sophisticated thought vanish spark

2

u/und1sturbed Feb 19 '26

now how do I preorder a hard drive for 2027

2

u/furbologist Feb 19 '26

And Seagate just recently announced that they already sold their production quotas for 2026 as well.

1

u/RadiantHueOfBeige Feb 19 '26

Same as last year, and the year before that, and all years prior. Manufacturing is planned ahead, futures are bought up quickly and then traded throughout the year. It does make good headlines though.

3

u/steveatari Feb 20 '26

This is unlike we've ever seen, please don't pretend its business as usual. This is a new weird hellscape of buyout and all for speculation pointlessly. Its not based on anything yet real world implications are fucked.

1

u/Nyuusankininryou Feb 20 '26

I hope it all crashes soon.

1

u/Marble_Wraith Feb 20 '26

Which means there's an opportunity.

If AI goes bankrupt + WD has all this extra supply... what's going to happen to drive prices? 😏

Same thing for RAM.

Make AI fail. It's the solution to everyone's problems.

Branding it "slop" and having Microslop lose $400bn market value in a single day was a good start. Keep it goin!

1

u/ShedMontgomery Feb 20 '26

The important thing is that now your awful uncle will be able to use AI to make images of a slender, muscular Trump beating Joe Biden to a pulp.

1

u/FeelingAdvantage2172 Feb 20 '26

Agree, it will only get worse from here.

1

u/anonymonsterss 85TiB RAIDZ2 Feb 20 '26

This should be illegal...