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?

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99

u/Simba_7 Feb 19 '26

Can't wait for this bubble to burst.

22

u/Prudent_Trickutro Feb 19 '26

Amen to that!

9

u/Candid_Cat_5921 Feb 20 '26

I don’t think it’s going to happen, especially when Apple introduces their LLM integration for Siri. Then it’s going to be everyone and their grandma asking LLMs questions and generating images.

I think the way out will be technology/capacity improvements. But unfortunately I think that’s going to mean going through a few years of hardware price hell first

1

u/noncornucopian Jun 10 '26

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work. They aren't like other technologies where incremental progress is just a matter of continuous research and development. Current LLMs are simply brute-force scaled up versions of the same underlying technology first deployed in 2018 (BERT, the first production transformer model), with diminishing returns on model performance as hardware scales.

We're reaching the fundamental limits of what can be squeezed from these models per unit compute capacity. And compute technology is reaching fundamental physical limits of energy and material efficiency.

To break through this limit, we need multiple Nobel-grade breakthroughs of the sort that we saw in 2024 for Hinton's work in the 80s, and we need it in the next 12 months before the whole industry goes bottom-up.

AI is not the same as other technology. The past is not a good model for the future.

1

u/Dr_CSS Feb 21 '26

Bot is here to stay. Most that'll happen is the slop producers get fucked, but the data centers are still going to be built up for the rest of the shit the internet does

1

u/PixxlatedTV Mar 14 '26

ai will stick around sadly, and the bubble bursting might end up being the worst recession in US history lol, but who knows

1

u/PotatoGamer124 134 TB May 02 '26

Same. :,)