Getting a half dozen 24tb nas drives this morning was painful. They are twice the cost of last fall and most vendors, even big ones, only had one or two available. This is insanity.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I declare all resources mine purchased with a fancy loan. Now that all resources are mine, they are all worth 100,000 times more then before. Dont worry, if you cant afford to pay 100,000x more you can rent some if my stuff! Also now that I own everything, I'm To Big To Fail and will need a bailout when I cant pay my fancy loan.
This is the healthiest, most efficient economy possible. To desire an alternative way to live our lives is now added to the DSM and will trigger involuntary institutionalization in a re-education camp.
Aliens visit earth and you want to know why? To study our highly advanced economic system of course!
What's next, PCB producers?
Doubt it. Those don’t require as crazy of infrastructure as microchips. If PCB starts going up, we’re in huge trouble
I really hope this is a temporary supply bottleneck. I understand the constraints of producing chips and highly specialized hardware but AI demand is only going to go up from here.
I'm optimistic a game changer gets whipped out of thin air
I'm afraid that a lot of the infrastructure will be heavily catered towards DoD computing resources. This means after the components hit their lifecycle, they aren't released to the used markets on ebay, instead they are shredded and rendered electronic waste.
All of those GPUs will be irrelevent in 24 months, and almost all of them are useless to consumers.
Its by design, its intentional.
They want you hooked to their cloud teat.
A lot of scientists, tinkerers, 3D renderers and such would love cheap A100s and up.
On the contrary, I don't think they will get cheaper. Somehow they'll get bought back and trashed (like Nvidia has done in the past), hoarded, tasked with busywork, something that that.
They wont let them leave because it'd be falling into "the competitions" hands.
They'll shred every single last bit of silicon.
3 months ago, watching ram prices skyrocketing, anticipating this exact scenario would happen, i bought 5 10tb drives.
best decision i've made in a while.
That's retirement money right there.
I ordered a couple of NAS drives during the holiday specials thinking the same thing. Received a confirmation email saying they would ship in a few days. 4 weeks passed without a single peep from WD. Started to get nervous my order would be cancelled. Then first week of January I got an email saying they were backordered but should be fulfilled "soon". Didn't get my drives till end of January but well worth the wait.
Bought a bunch of 20s a while back. My only concern now is if (when) one of them dies, I might not be able to get the same one (or any at all).
Nice. I got three 14TBs around the same time for the same reason glad I did.
I'm so fucking over this bullshit.
Bullshit. I call 100% bullshit.
Wdym? Do you believe the manufacturers would try to congincr you they're out of stock to create scarcity and increace prices?!? Do you jnow how silly that idea is?! \s
Those datacenters are real. AI companies aren't using their money to build empty buildings. They're buying enormous amounts of computer hardware off the market to fill them.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/18/inside-the-worlds-most-powerful-ai-datacenter/
Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.
These AI datacenters are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions around the world. Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI datacenters in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratize access to AI services globally.
An AI datacenter is a unique, purpose-built facility designed specifically for AI training as well as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and applications. Microsoft’s AI datacenters power OpenAI, Microsoft AI, our Copilot capabilities and many more leading AI workloads.
The new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin stands as a remarkable feat of engineering, covering 315 acres and housing three massive buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roofs. Constructing this facility required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.
Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, it will deliver 10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.
Hard drives haven't been impacted nearly much as memory, which is the real bottleneck, but when just one AI company, OpenAI, rolls up and buys 40% of global memory production capacity's output, it'd be extremely unlikely that we wouldn't see memory shortages for at least a while, since it takes years to build new production capacity. And then you have other AI companies who want memory. And purchases of memory from companies who are, as a one-off, extending their PC upgrade cycle, due to the current shortage who will also be competing for supply. If you have less supply relative to demand of a product, price goes up to the new point where the available amount of memory people are willing to buy at that new price point matches what's actually available. Everyone else gets priced out. And it won't be until either demand drops (which is what people talking about a 'bubble popping' are thinking might occur, if the AI-infrastructure-building effort stops sooner than expected), or enough new production capacity comes online to provide enough supply, that that'll change. Memory manufacturers are building new factories and expanding existing ones, and we've had articles about that. But it takes years to do that.
25% of the datacenters being constructed right now will go bankrupt.
The majority of this AI surge is for datacenters that neither have power nor water.
Its all gonna end up being shredded, if it exists at all.
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Can't wait for the bubble to pop and the used SAS HDD market to overflow with cheap hardware. Same with RAM.
Same with RAM.
Unfortunately, the RAM shortage is caused by a RAM component being diverted to specialized packages that can't easily be converted into normal RAM. So even a bubble bursting won't bring RAM onto the market.
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I guess my combined 12TB across five drives ranging in age from 13 to six years old will have to suffice. The only reason I'd need to buy a new drive is if a couple of my current drives die. Which does happen on occasion, of course.
Also, fuck AI, and the assholes who made it, and everyone who currently, personally profits off it. This bubble popping will be the catalyst to take down the entire world economy. MMW.
Yeah fortunately mine are all in RAID arrays, hopefully none die in the next year or I may have to run degraded.
This feels like such a beginner question to be asking on Lemmy, let alone the tech community, but how does one go about setting up a RAID array to have my data mirrored? I only know the basics I remember about raid 1 and raid 0.
Is this RAID array something you can do without one of those "multi-hard drive units"? I have 2 16TB hard drives that I'd like to have one as a mirror copy of the first as a backup that updates at the same time but they feel too big to fit into one of those units. But maybe setting up a RAID array could be done programmatically.
I'd love and appreciate if anyone could point me in the right direction!
TrueNAS is a easy way to start
nowadays RAID is done with software, on linux if possible. common choices are ZFS and md-raid. you connect drives with SATA or SAS to a computer, and you can add them to a pool. drives added to pool will be formatted once.
hardware raid is discouraged, because if the RAID card fails you need a replacement of the exact same kind, with same firmware version, and they can have other difficulties too that software RAID solutions don't.
That's great, I'd love to not have to buy one of those machines, and I have been running my JF on a laptop just running Linux with a single one of the 16tb drives.
If the drives added to the pool need to be formatted, is there a possibility that it wipes the data on it? I'll take a bit of time to read up on some of the options you mentioned.
Thanks for the help!
also, when and where did you buy those 16 TB drives? I badly need a few like those
Haha, it was a year and a half ago, and it was a Canada Computers sale. Just checked and it doesn't look like it's TOO much more expensive yet, but who knows for how long.
If the drives added to the pool need to be formatted, is there a possibility that it wipes the data on it?
that's what I meant, yes, but you said you have 2 16 TB drives right? at least with ZFS, setting up a mirror can be done only starting with a single drive. It's a godsend.
first, you take the empty drive, check that it's actually empty, and if so, create a ZFS pool of a single drive from it, with zpool create. copy all your data over. you can use rsync, it has a bunch of options for preserving most filesystem metadata, and for printing progress.
when done, check that absolutely everything got transferred, and add the other 16 TB drive too to the pool with zpool attach. doing this will convert the pool with only a disk vdev, into a pool with a mirror vdev of 2 disks.
further recommended reading: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/man/master/8/zpool.8.html
you may want to enable compression from the beginning. if you do it later, existing data won't be compressed. media files mostly don't benefit from this. compression is enabled on the dataset level, with the zfs command, if you set it to lz4 (recommended alg) for the root dataset, everything will be compressed that way.
Oh this is perfect, thanks so much! I've got one of the hard drives in use but I could definitely wipe the other one to make a proper copy with the zpool.
Thanks for giving me a fun little week task!
also, when and where did you buy those 16 TB drives? I badly need a few like those
Just in case: https://serverpartdeals.com/ Still the same sort of prices you expect, but decent warranties on re-certified enterprise HDDs.
Oddly, I've never had an HDD or SSD ever die on me. I've got old ass ones that aren't even a GB that I've torn apart and thrown away. My oldest SSD just got removed and put in a cabinet because 256gb is just too small.
Their prices seem 2x what they were a few years ago. 2.5 years ago I bought two 16TB HGSTs from them for $170 each.
Well, yeah. Everybody's prices are that much higher. I think the cheapest I saw on there recently is like $17.20/terabyte. And I didn't see them cheaper anywhere else.
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