My theory is that we’re hitting that limit again, most people don’t need more than a terabyte or two tops, so companies adapt.
Kind of shite being on the “need a bit more” side because I feel they’ll do everything to bleed us dry. My 2022 4TB drive was less than 100€, today 3+ years later, it’s 139€.
Yet people will scalp, buy more products and defend it by saying “but I need this”. There used to be a time, where consumers would drive the industry, not anymore. And this leads to companies doing what ever they want.
People just accept for no reason.Remember a year or so ago when they all spun down production so they could charge more money for drives? I do.
AI crap. Infesting everything. Search of all kinds, photo management, telephone menus, who knows what else. And it does none of it well.
I don’t have issues with local AIs, for things like searching your local immich instance, or controlling your local Home Assistant devices. That photo of a bird you took 3’ish years ago? Yeah, you can find it in like three seconds with a local AI search. Want to turn the lights on with a voice request? AI is one of the easiest ways for a layman to handle the language processing side of things. All of that is a drop in the ocean.
But corporations have been trying to cram it into everything, even when it’s not a good fit for what they want to do. And so far, their solution to making it fit hasn’t been to rethink their usage and consider whether or not it will actually improve a product. Instead, their approach has simply been to build more and bigger data centers, to throw increasing amounts of processing power at the problem.
The technology itself isn’t inherently harmful on the small scale. But it has followed the same pattern as climate change. Individual consumers are blamed for climate change, and are consistently urged to change their consumption habits… When it’s actually a handful of corporations producing the vast majority of greenhouse emissions. Even if every single person drastically changed their emission habits, it would barely make a dent in the overall production. It was all because of massive astroturfed PR campaigns to shift the blame away from those companies and onto individuals. And we’ve seen that same thing happen with AI, where individual users have been blamed for using AI, instead of the massive corporations.
Think of all the cheap hardware being resold when the AI bubble pops.
There wasn’t as big of a price drop as I thought there would be when the crypto mining switched to ASIC from GPUs. Don’t know if all that hardware just got dumped or is sitting in a rack rotting somewhere. Hope that we get cheaper prices when the bubble pops, this artificial scarcity sucks.
Immich does photo management pretty well.
I think your sentiment and the back end requirements of AI is a big downfall of it, as while your sentiment has validity in many public facing deployments of it there are some things it is actually succeeding at. I speak from experience having used it for several specific use cases which it excels at, but you and others probably don’t have time nor care that this is true. And again marketing idiots out weight the deliberate approach that engineers and others might want, much less the economy might need.
Preaching down to folks who already have a good reason to hate your product is a good way to join that pile
Having done my research, and tried it, I’m not an ignorant F*** as I read and engage at least. You just like being a troll.
Man go fuck yourself
HaViNg DoNe My ReSeArCh!
What’s the over/under that they’re a Libertarian?
cases which it excels at
Uhuh
Like how my colleagues often come to me saying they fixed it with Cursor and when I check the UI where the bug was, the page doesn’t even load at all now.
I just had someone tell me they did something with AI and when I checked they didn’t even get right the very basic thing of coding around the right controller names. The fucking names were wrong. They didn’t even check the feature, they just shipped, called it fixed, and told me Cursor figured it out really quickly.
I’m tired of this. I’m REALLY tired of this, man…
I posted this as a perspective on AI that is not given by AI, nor by someone who believes it will stay this way, but nor am I promoting it. I believe it’s more nuanced that just being crap, although it is taking over many things in life. I have used it, I know how to use it for good (keeping it private, local, and to help teach reasoning as well as do the thing that we need done (like dishes, bills, and other bullshit). I’m fully aware it’s a bubble (14 billion to 1.4 trillion for OpenAI alone), dislike it and hate the energy waste. You all just seem to want to keep up the ignorant web user stereotype.
Have fun down voting something you don’t really understand.literally no one is saying “we need to kill all pursuits of ai because it’s bad at organizing my photos”
Why HDD’s?
I thought LLMs ran on a fuckload of VRAM and thats pretty much it. So the GPU market was the main affected?
Stolen data
Note: Posted by the same media outlet that reported last week about the 9700X3D with zero fact checking
So, if the AI bubble pops, it’ll be a great time to build a PC
Like there won’t be some other hype to immediately take it’s place. Just like Bitcoin GPU prices never collapsed because it went right into AI hype.
Tbf Bitcoin didn’t fuck with the GPU market, that was more etherium’s doing
Bitcoin trashed the GPU market before moving on to Asics. Then other coins kept going on GPUs.
The next hype lined up is quantum
Fortunately they won’t need most normal PC hardware for this. At least not CPU’s and GPUs AFAIK.
“Quantum emulation” all the hype, 1/1000th the efficiency, 1000X the excuses to sell hardware
I was about to post this, but call it virtualized quantum.
It’ll probably just be LLMs claiming to have the same probability as a quantum calculator and just spit out made up primes so long we wont be able easily check them.
There are a lot of “refurbished” drives from when the Chia bubble popped (a useless shitcoin that wasted HDD space with garbage data as a proof of cryptographic work)
Data storage devices are the last items you wanna buy second hand though. A drive failing could mean much more than just having to buy a new one.
HDDs used for chia mining or similar shitcoins have been used for just a full wipe to create the huge rainbow table or whatever the shitcoin needed and then left on idle with very little read activity for years
It’s not the typical “end of life” server HDD with 80k hours of 24/7 full use
Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you
Ouch, I picked the wrong time to finally upgrade from my 12 year old laptop and Windows 7?
Just install Linux on it. My laptop is from 2011 and I’ve got bazzite on it and it’s been great. That should atleast get you through the bubble
Yeah but it’s a hardware issue that’s beyond my caring to try and troubleshoot. Random blue screens, memtest86 shows an error always at the same address no matter which sodimms I put or swap them around. I guess it runs until software enters that address range and blam! I think it might be power supply related at the board level, not the power brick. I don’t feel like changing capacitors at random, for all I know there might be voltage out of spec because a resistor value drifted.
If the memory error is in a small address range and you are willing to get super nerdy, you can tell the linux kernel to avoid the bad addresses. Some discussion in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/740806/user-friendly-way-to-apply-badram-patterns
yeah win7 is better than any later winproduct
And what exactly has that to do with HDDs?
OP is upgrading FROM 12 yr old hardware during a time where hardware prices prices are rising due to a shortage of some components because AI data centers are demanding them.
Ok but what has that to do with HDDs??? Every normal Laptop nowadays comes with an M2 SSD…
It doesn’t need to have anything to do with SSDs. The point is there is a hardware shortage of something that most computers have and laptop manufactures can use that as an excuse to raise prices. Also just because most laptops come with M.2 SSDs doesn’t mean all of them would. There may be some that use 2.5" HDDs.
EDIT: After looking through the article this also affects SSDs.
That means if a firm wants to buy large-capacity hard drives, the backbone of nearline storage, it has to wait 24 months due to long lead times. As the news cycle suggests, AI money doesn’t wait for anyone, so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders. Picking QLC over TLC allows them to maintain costs while achieving sufficient endurance for cold storage.
However, hoarding QLC NAND creates its own shortage, since every cloud provider in North America and China is now lining up to buy it. This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide, as most value-oriented models use QLC to save costs. In fact, DigiTimes claims that production capacity for QLC is completely booked through 2026 at some NAND manufacturers.
Oh for fucks sake… I wanted to expand my NAS… Crypto was (is still responsible) for the shit state of the GPU Market and now it’s the next scam.
Just got 12TB IronWolf last week for an average price if 260euro. Delivery is long but other than that, price is average.
Checked just right now - average 310euro for the same HDD. From the place I picked mine - 293. SCORE!
Thinking about this for a minute - that’s probably pre-Black-Friday prices. We’ll see
What else are these data centers going to hoard?
Jobs, GPUs, water, hard drives
First outrageous DDR5 RAM prices now ssd’s.
Welp. Won’t be upgrading my pc for the next few years I see
RAID5, don’t fail me now!
Ram shortage too. But most users should avoid QLC.
TL;DR
QLC drives have fewer write-cycles than TLC and if their data is not refreshed periodically (which their controllers will automatically do when powered) the data in them gets corrupted faster.
In other words, under heavy write usage they will last less time and at the other end when used for long term storage of data, they need to be powered much more frequently merelly to refresh the stored states (by reading and writting back the data).
So moving to QLC in cloud application comes with mid and long terms costs in terms of power usage and, more importantly, drive end-of-life and replacement.
–
Quad Level Cell SSD technology stores 4 bits per cell - hence 16 levels - whilst TLC (Triple Level Cell) stores 3 bits - hence 8 levels - so the voltage difference between levels is half as much, and so is the margin between levels.
Everything deep down is analog, so the digital circuitry actually stores analog values on the cells at then reads them back and converts them to digital. When reading that analog value, the digital circuit has to decide to which digital value that analog value actual maps to, which it does by basically accepting any analog value within a certain range aroun the mathematically perfect value for that digital state.
(A simple example: in a 3.3V data line, when the I/O pin of a microcontroller reads the voltage it will decide for example that anything below 1.2V is a digital LOW (i.e. a zero), anything above 2.1V is a HIGH (a one) and anything in between is an erroneous value - i.e. no signal or a corrupted signal - this by the way is why if you make the line between a sender and a receiver digital chip too long, many meters, or change the signals in them too fast, hundreds of MHz+, without any special techniques to preserve signal integrity, the receiver will mainly read garbage)
So the more digital levels in a single cell the narrower the margin, the more likely that due to the natural decay over time of the stored signal or due cell damage from repeat writes, the analog value the digital circuitry reads from it be too far away from the stored digital level and be at best marked as erroneous or at worse be at a different level and thus yield a different digital value.
All this to say that QLC has less endurance (i.e. after fewer writes the damage to the cells from use causes that what is read is not the same value as what was written) and it also has less retention (i.e. if the cell is not powered, the signal decay will more quickly cause stored values to end up at a different level than when written).
Now, whilst for powered systems the retention problem is not much of an issue for cloud storage (when powered, the system automatically goes through each cell, reading its value and writting it back to refresh what’s stored there back to the mathematically perfect analog value) with just a slightly higher consumption over time for data that’s mainly read only (for flash memory, writting uses way more power than reading), the endurance problem is much worse for QLC because the cells will age twice as fast over TLC for data that is frequently written (wear-leveling exists to spreads this effect over all cells thus giving higher overall endurance, but wear-leveling is also in there for TLC so it does not improve the endurance of QLC).
