Yeah but I cannot find any HDDs
I am SO pissed off about this AI hardware grab causing global shortages, im about to revert to using fucking tape drives for storage and core rope memory as RAM.
Its by design, I swear. They don’t have anywhere to run any of this gear, its all piling up somewhere.
Either that or it doesn’t exist and what we’re seeing is price gouging based on hypothetical demand based off of “letters of intent” that aren’t actually worth the paper they’re written on.
I think its the latter.
It’s definitely the latter. These are writing contracts to buy hardware that has yet to be produced for data centres that haven’t been built. All so they can satisfy a demand that doesn’t yet exist for a product no one is going to be willing to pay for.
It will crash. This whole grift is too expensive to keep going. The naysayers keep forgetting that hardware gets old, it wears out and fails, and gets superseded by newer models. The chip makers are riding high now because the idiotic belief of the market is that this will keep growing as the data centres keep being built and the AI companies will keep buying new hardware.
It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.
It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.
I hope you’re right b/c right now feels like the classic “market can stay irrational longer than we can stay liquid” type situation.
Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven’t actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.
Hopefully the bubble pops soon, though I hate that Americans’ 401Ks and IRAs will take the brunt of the “losses” when it does.
The whole thing is speculation because its based off the back of letters of intent, no real contracts for anything. Its all still, currently, smoke and mirrors until something is inked and someone gets paid (or atleast, finance agreed)
So right now, we’re watching bullshit speculators sink the market. And/or restricted supply being used to milk us like cows.
on the plus side, when the AI bubble pops, hardware will be soooooo cheap
If people refuse to pay the prices and use their products then eventually they will run out of money and credit to do so.
It’s the components that make up these things that’s being bought to make data center hardware. They never make it to the consumer product factory.
Uhhuh so they’re tooling up to make devices for a company that wont exist soon for datacenters that have no power.
All that shit is going in the landfill and they will be desperately repackaging HBM into consumer products. Bet.
I didn’t realize HDDs are taking a hit now… I’m moving overseas and opted to move my sever with me instead of rebuilding since ram alone is close to 1k now. I didn’t price HDDs at the time cause they are only 4 years old… Sure hope they hold on for another few years…
I scored some new WD 14tb drives for $120 US last October, and I am glad I did! Was a hell of a deal.
Wow thats awesome I’m so happy for you.
Not sure how to add alt text on mobile but thats a rat clenching his fist
I did not see the fist so am glad you added the text. Awesome rat!
When I first got my Synologies set up (~2024), I got 4x 12TB refurb DC drives for $75 each from goharddrive on eBay. Today, those same drives are $220 each. Absolutely ridiculous.
So now instead of expanding my space, I just cut back on my usage to make more room, bc it’ll be a long time before I can afford an upgrade.
Was going to buy a bunch off serverpartdeals in January/february. Got one for Christmas as a gift at least, but the en the price started going to the moon and I’ve decided the raid array can wait
Ram and HDD prices: 📈
Me: 😭
Buy old servers.
How old are we talking?
Punch cards are cheap.
I run on dual Xeon R410s with 128Gb of RAM (2013?). Got them for free, on Kijiji. Runs Proxmox on both and a pile of VMs. Dual GB nics, 6 SAS bays, HBA in IT mode for ZFS. Has iLo for OOB management, or whatever the Dell equivalent is.
I mean, it’s not fast, but each server has 24 cores and I can chunk PDF files fairly quickly for RAG on 10 cores and have plenty for mail server, Nextcloud, K8S running some side hustle apps, etc, etc. Kind of a noisy prick when it winds up though.
I have 1 tb usb
Buy from third world then
I run, my own:
- Mbin server
- Matrix server
- Nextcloud server
- GitLab server and Gitea server
- Speedtest server
- PlantUML server
- Wekan server
- BCH Explorer
- Grafana
- Mumble server
- Dozens of websites
- Proxmox instance that hosted its all, at home
Jellyfin and Immich jave stayed as mainstays after like 2 dozen projects I’ve tried on. That and a Samba share.
How was setting up immich? Looking to expand and that seems interesting.
Give it a go, I just finished the docker with tailscale setup. Using parts of this guide from Alex from tailscale https://youtu.be/guHoZ68N3XM (for the ones saying don’t post yt links, I’ve not seen an add in the past 6 years or so, just use revanced) 2 hickups I had to overcome: a dns issue and different gpu passthrough then jellyfin uses). Reason was unpriviliged lxc in proxmox in both cases. But I prefer an lxc in this case. Just lost 2hrs looking back at old photos, it works great! Rdy for introducing it to my non tech wife!
Beginner here. What do you mean by a Samba share? Do you mean a shared network folder? Or something more elaborate?
Yes they mean a SMB share. A type of network share that works (mostly) with Linux and windows.
do NOT open SMB to the internet. You will get crypto’d in minutes. Just a warning for any newbs coming here.
Jellyfin is great. My latest addition to my media ecosystem was audiobookshelf which is really nice as well if you like to listen to ebooks.
I do believe, you may in fact, perhaps, be a nerd.
You don’t happen to have a simple how-to or wiki for these services do you?
Official documentation is all well and good but sometimes it can be a nightmare to follow and understand (Nextcloud for example had me pulling my hair) for us mere nerdlings that haven’t achieved full nerdhood yet.
Is that one machine?
Yes just one homelab server.
Actually even its on 1 Linux VM (but that doesn’t mean you should also use a single VM). Anyways tldr; Yes.
Edit: ow… And you should too!
Oh, what’s the speedtest server?
I’ve not run into that yet myself, but I’d love to have one of those.
I run OpenSpeedTest Server.
Mhm, waiting for ai bubble to burst so I can upgrade my current rig to something future proof
We need to, but can we?
Wouldn’t this topic be more appropriate in other communities? Preaching to the choir here.
You can cross post it?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSD Solid State Drive mass storage ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
[Thread #100 for this comm, first seen 17th Feb 2026, 19:51] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Could you also have a row for english?
Time to repurpose all of my random mixed capacity HDDs in a bag somewhere, I guess.
Thanks doc
I’ve got 200TB of HDDs all with 80,000+ hours on them :(
