One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.
I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.
[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.
ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.
I bought 8x 4TB NAS RED 5400RPM HDD and paid in total AUD$1.4k, I am not even joking. My pool is only 8TB mirrorer and I am keeping the other 16TB as spare because things will get worse.
I bought them brand new because used ones cannot be trusted but even that brings risks.
WD has been selling 7200RPM labelled as 5400RPM disks.
WD was selling SMR disks instead of CMR disks.
Seagate disks used into crypto farms are being sold as brand new, so folks are finding our their brand new disks have 65k hours.
Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now).
Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.
We are trully doomed.
I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…
For example this seller: https://www.ebay.com/str/disctechllc
“Accidentally miss-priced” a bunch of drives, and then instead of canceling the orders, refunded everyone, but still shipped packages: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...
I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the “26” sold on their listings that are now astronomically priced: https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT
Edit: They also lied on their customs declarations (!)
It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.
Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?
He's basically created a sort of one-sided economic "Ferry Ordeal" (like the Joker on The Dark Knight [1]), basically leaving us consumers to not be exploited only if there are decent men at the helm of big businesses. It could be asymmetrical instead of one-sided if you consider that the people can only tolerate so much squeezing before they start clamoring for guillotines [2].
[1]: https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Ferry_Ordeal_and_Skyscraper_B...
Btw gas goes up when oil goes up not just because it can replace it in some applications, but also because it is often produced and transported in the same areas as oil, by the same companies involved in oil, so it is typically affected in similar ways.
Generally people just don't understand how long ramping up new production facilities can take and what is the realistic pay off period for them.
Production is actually falling this year compared to last for Samsung and Hynix (there was an article on here a few days ago?).
Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.
1. Factories take time to build.
2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now.
3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years.
4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.
I was planning on upgrading my disks about a year ago, but help holding off for discounts. The AI race to the bottom, driving up prices only really started happening within the last 12 months (at least for HDDs) and now I'm too late.
They are rationing in Slovenia to prevent 'gasoline tourism' (people taking advantage of lower taxes), not due to shortages.
This is incorrect.
AI runs on data above all else. Gotta feed the compute.
It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.
China is doing it but that was for merely creating tech independence.
Didn’t these companies collude before? I’m sorry but I don’t believe that they’re also using this opportunity to make as much money as possible as well.
Much like the GPU/crypto boom/bust some years ago, but on an even larger scale.
Why not normalize that, if things don't work out, the government steps in, buys the business, and offers a better regulated version of the business?
Capitalism is generally touted as useful for innovation; but haven't we paid collectively for the initial investment for many businesses many times over now that there's little innovation done? By definition there's no innovation once the only thing happening in a business sector is consolidation.
So, I'd conclude that capitalism isn't useful to us at that point, and actually harmfully inefficient (too costly for consumers), so we'd be wise to do away with it by that point in favor of a more efficiently run operational/economic system... That would actually be innovative! What that system looks like, I'm not sure, but I imagine it's something like a cooperative.
I had two Dell SFF with i7 LGA1151, I bought second hand motherboard on eBay which goes against my standard, because everything is so ridiculous expensive, to use those CPUs and memories.
I have a few DDR4 2400 memories.
My TrueNAS is running local brand SSD that are dirty cheap and for being in mirror gives me a somewhat peace of mind.
I bought a WD Black NVMe as spare for my gaming laptop running Linux in case it dies, and 2x Crucial one from Amazon German, I won't be buying them any decade soon.
Things are bad but it is better to buy things now while you can, if you don't and with things getting worse, second hand market will also become a carnage.
Facebook Marketplace is usually a gold garden to buy good goods for cheap, even there now things are matching eBay prices. You can still find solid and cheap stuff but things are starting to change.
Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning platters.
Example: Why are you posting here when you could be solving world hunger? Don't you care about starving children?
The global oil & gas supply has been disrupted and cannot recover overnight as actual infrastructure is gone.
Someone will need to reduce consumption.
These are just facts and physics of supply & demand.
We can always debate on who will get hit more or what resources will be affected more.
I don’t blame you. It’s almost impossible to predict how this will play out.
The global memory shortage due to rapid AI data center expansion is hitting everyone, even the biggest tech companies in the world.
Case in point: Sony is suspending orders for almost all SD card sales from both vendors and consumers, per PetaPixel. The announcement was made on Sony's Japanese website, and explicitly blamed the lack of available memory as a reason why it can't fulfill SD card orders for the time being. Sony's full statement is as follows:
Mashable Light Speed
Thank you for your continued patronage of Sony products.
Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is anticipated that supply will not be able to meet demand for CFexpress memory cards and SD memory cards for the foreseeable future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the acceptance of orders from our authorized dealers and from customers at the Sony Store from March 27, 2026 onwards.
Regarding the resumption of order acceptance, we will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.
CFExpress Type A and Type B cards, as well as regular SD cards, are all affected by this move. Some low-end cards appear to still be in production, per PetaPixel, but as it stands, just assume that any card you see on a store shelf is the last one you'll see there for a while from Sony. The company's statement even straight up said that it doesn't know when it will be able to get the manufacturing up and running again.
You May Also Like
Sony follows Western Digital as a fellow big tech memory manufacturer that is feeling the squeeze from the needs of data centers. Western Digital announced in February that it had sold out of all hard drives for the year, with 10 whole months to go. This wasn't a great week for Sony in general, as the company also announced massive price hikes on its current-gen PlayStation video game consoles, most likely for the same reasons that it had to stop making SD cards.