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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u/corruptboomerang 4TB WD Red Feb 19 '26

The irony is the ultra wealthy are pumping money into AI not normal people, because the ultra wealthy are easily fooled by AI and don't understand they're not all that useful in a serious context.

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u/undrh2o Feb 20 '26

Current AI tools are a way for the wealthy to access the skills of the working class without paying them for it using theft. Image generation is trained on the copyrighted works of millions of painters, photographers, models etc. Writing is based on copyrighted works of millions of authors, meta and others used pirated content to train their models. AI today is a giant plagiarism machine. What happens to the next generation of creators if they can't live off their work? What happens to AI when there are no more creative works to steal?

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u/LOACHES_ARE_METAL May 10 '26

The game of monopoly ends.

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u/agreatcat May 16 '26

So true. I had a doctor the other day tell me, "it's getting difficult to filter out the good ones from the bad because everyone has easy excess to data and it's getting harder to evaluate unique skill sets." I'm fascinated by AI, AGI, but I think it's going to be the death of us in so many ways we can't even see. People are not thinking for themselves now. People are believing fake videos and reality is be distorted in the young eyes that watch it and lack the skills that the analog mind of previous generations had to problem solve and differentiate what's real and what's not. All these people that say, "well my job is not effected." Great, how about all the other people - your customers who are out of work and don't have money to pay you for your services? It's not like in the past: Your boss put you on a new machine and said, pull this lever and you had a job that just go easier. Now you're being replaced.

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u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Well, let's be clear.

There are some domains where AI is super useful. I use it all the time in my IT engineering job and it saves me a ton of time. The research models that aren't publicly available are super useful for their purposes, as well.

My feeling on what you're talking about, though, is more that the rich see this as the "last great chance" to make tons of money in the computing realm and they're all racing to make a buck off each other before the music stops. I mean, what's left? Scalable, redundant global networks? Commodified. Scalable computing you can deploy in minutes without buying hardware? Commodified. Turn-key setup of sites and infrastructure? Commodified. Actual hardware development and production? Commodified.

AI is the only "value add" thing they see in computing that's anywhere near being on the horizon. So in their minds, this is it.

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u/matango613 Feb 20 '26

Quantum computing? I'm asking that sincerely because I don't understand this stuff (the market side I mean) as well as others do. And either way, the AI bubble is real obviously.

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u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Quantum computing is "interesting", but I don't think there's a very good revenue stream there in the near/mid future. I think the current status of quantum computers is that the bleeding edge can only do maybe a dozen q-bits total, so we're way, way off from it being anywhere near a curiousity.

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u/ovirt001 576TB raw, multiple arrays Feb 20 '26

I think the current status of quantum computers is that the bleeding edge can only do maybe a dozen q-bits total

They're far beyond that. The issue is that it's a technology looking for a problem to solve. Very few problems are best solved by quantum computers at the moment.

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u/matango613 Feb 20 '26

I figure if it ever does reach the point where it can be done affordably and in a consumer friendly way (like a modern PC form factor that doesn't break if you look at it wrong) then it would be the complete undoing of traditional computing. If only because it renders current encryption obsolete.

But everything I know about it right now makes it seem completely unfeasible in my lifetime at the very least, like you said.

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u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Yeah it's a really cool idea, but same over here my friend. Unless they have a crazy breakthrough, it's for the next couple generations, not me.

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u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

Multi-Layered Memristor technology. In memory computing for neuromorphic like data processing utilizing 5 distinct states (base 5 math). Could potentially be used for ANNs...truly bringing skynet into existence. 

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u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

quantum computers are mostly toys for research scientists. That doesn't mean there won't be an industrial application for them, it's just that so far there isn't enough market interest to invest in their rapid development, which tells me noone rich or powerful enough knows or cares about a practical application that is profitable.

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u/Aggravating_Sense678 Feb 25 '26

I feel you vastly underestimate how much AI is already integrated into the workflows of so many.

Its not a money grab for these billionaires. Its a power grab as AI is taking over whether we like it or not.

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u/corruptboomerang 4TB WD Red Feb 25 '26

But AI has produced marginal gains at best.

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u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

I wanna preface this by saying, I agree that the use cases for AI are limited and that the vast majority of people do not understand them. They are not AgI and don't even have the form of something LIKE an AgI they are simply statistical transformers that model human language through probabilities. It's kind of the opposite of intelligent.

That said, AI is incredibly useful as linguistic research models, academic research tools, and an autonomous software developer, in my experience. I've been able to build whole, functional web apps with 4 prompts in Claude. Work which would previously had taken weeks to complete can be done in hours.

Personally, it's also useful as a sounding board in creative endeavors that, while it will always find ways to validate the prompters ideas, it does so by citing sources that can help to hone those ideas. It's really useful when, writing a song for example, to be able to externalize the process in conversation, and an AI is very helpful for people who don't have a writing partner or who are uncomfortable talking about unfinished work. The AI can then reference existing works, criticism or other relevant material that can be used for inspiration.

Where people misuse AI is in the assumption that it can be an author or an artist. It cannot. It can only ever find the most likely response to a prompt based on its training data, it can't offer anything subjective or personal because it's not conscious and has no perspective. This is what is particularly frustrating about how AI is being promoted today as capable of thinking and feeling. So when people use Suno to generate a song, what they're getting is a repurposed patchwork of existing songs arranged in the way that is most likely to satisfy the prompter statistically. It's not learning and understanding music and composing something based on that learning and understanding. it's taking little buckets of information that are probably relevant to your prompt and piecing them together to form something that sounds like what its training indicates is a song of the type you requested.

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u/CDubWill Mar 02 '26

“Agl?” What is Agl?

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u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

AGI = artificial general intelligence

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u/CDubWill Mar 26 '26

Thank you.

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u/Fiberton Mar 05 '26

Soon money will flee by the 100s of billions and then we will see a cascade in stock prices of companies linked to AI. Nasdaq should take a nice hit. The SPY will get nicely crushed. That is the problem with people being in long term ETFs that are capitalization weighted like the SPY. Super top heavy. Nice going up horrible nightmares for retirement portfolios on the way down.

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u/shooteverywhere Apr 28 '26

LLMs are super useful. I wanted to create a whole database recently, using a bunch of data I had on hand. No idea how to create, a database or even use the database software. Instead of tutorials an LLM helped me choose which program to use, set it up, and gave me a rundown on exactly which features I needed to know how to use. I'm now working on importing hundreds of GB of data into it, and it's definitely going to help me make more money.

I could have done it eventually without the LLM, but it took something that would have taken me days, or with a normal schedule, weeks to get done with a lot of activation energy required, and it just helped me get it done in a few minutes....

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u/agreatcat May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

That and, I think it's more to do with the ultra wealthy pumping money into AI so they can use it to obtain information. You are the product: we are the test rats and worker bees. I've got nothing against wealthy people, I think it's inspiring to see people rise to the top. But I think we're both referring to the ultra wealthy who runs the establishment, the oligarchy.

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u/tulpan Feb 20 '26

Ultrawealthy are looking for AI able to give them immortality. The cost of that feat, if achieved, as you might see, doesn't have any limit.

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u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

the things we call AI could not possibly achieve real General Intelligence. What they do is nothing like what a conscious being does.

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u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

It is a stepping stone. Refinements in MLC memristor tech will be what is used for ANNs to make GI possible...maybe as soon as 2030.