For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
Good that Toshiba saw the increase in demand as an opportunity to increase sales volume, rather than price gouge their customers. Hopefully they gain market share.
IDK, it's pretty risky. Doubling production means youre taking a bet that the bubble is not going to burst.
Hard disks will always have demand, we need more every day and they have a limited lifespan
Yeah, I keep getting storage to get redundant back ups. My last big storage purchase was getting some before the US president took office because of the tarrif threats. But, I'll eventually need to get more.
I’m pretty behind what I want for drives, and modern dev practices of storing tons of intermediate container build artifacts, and a resurgence of arrrborists will probably soak up drive demand even if prices fall.
Great point! Septuple production!
Prices are so up that even when it bursts, they will go to normal ones. I mean price per GB was normal to go down, and now for 1st time in history it went up.
Same and worse for RAM.
Its like we are 15 years back for RAM and like 10 years back for HDDs.
Cory Doctorow is making the argument that the reason RAM prices are high is the producers aren't building new fabs for the data centre demand because those are expensive and hence strategic long term investments. If AI is a bubble they would have a lot of product and no one to sell it to, cratering the market.
That is a fair point, especially with things that are very hard to set production for like processors.
sales volume
There's more competition in the storage market than RAM. Someone was going to do it, might as well be them.
I just want affordable storage again in the single digit TB drives, maybe low teens. I waited too long to build a multi drive nas and now I have regerts.
When my 4 TB drive died ~15 years ago I thought to myself I'd just wait a few months and replace it with 8 TB for the same price. Then the floods happened.
Then prices almost were finally at that level again. And then AI started gobbling everything up.
IIRC storage started rapidly rising even before AI, due to those stupid proof-of-storage cryptos.
Yeah, 2TB SSDs are honestly fine for everything except bulk storage.
From my perspective the older slower ssds are fine for bulk storage, you just can't get them. My ideal would be a 4-8TB SSD that is as cheap as an equivalent SSD, as marginally faster than a HDD
More than marginally, unless HDDs have gotten a LOT better in the last five years, hahah.
The good, more HDDs and bigger drives.
The bad, they will directly to data centers.
Consumers aren't buying large drives like this, those are intended for data centers. And if they're increasing production aimed at those capacities, that means smaller capacity stock opening up for consumers.
My point was that the data centers will swallow all of the increased capacity so consumers will not get more HDDs. Of course it could still be seen as a good thing because otherwise the part for consumers could have decreased.
Straight to the datacenters. And once they get their five years out of them, straight into to the shredder.
Wouldn't want any normies getting their hands on them, and having ideas of not using whatever subscription cloud computer bullshit they've forced on us by then.
I hope it alleviates the pressure. I need to upgrade the 4TB in my array, badly. It’s all on borrowed time.
I have 4x8tb drives that have way too many hours on them
I don’t want to look. I think mine might be getting towards 10 years old.
Toshiba are the real ones.
I don't hoard video files, so 1TB still seems unimaginably vast. I was shocked when I learned my entire CD collection, ripped to FLAC, would fit on my phone. 100TB is like a billion dollars, my mind has difficulty understanding numbers that large.
You get games that are several hundred gigabytes these days - high resolution art assets are big.
Filling up a 1TB drive is easy. 100TB, yeah, that's a lot of space.
Don't count bytes, look at what they can store: 1TB will hold like four to eight recent AAA games.
Even if you do need 100 TB of storage, I feel like it'd be a lot better to have multiple smaller drives rather than one massive one. To be fair, though, I'd expect such large drives to be targeted mostly to commercial customers.
My 116TB pirate ship could use a few more 100TBs to keep afloat.
I'm in a smaller, but similar boat with my 40TB. A few of the drives are pretty old now, and i would prefer swapping them out before they die.
Really depends on what you store. If you archive videogames like i do, 100TB is a good place to be, and redundancy means you need more than one.
Larger storage is good for videos (think Blu-rays, 4K videos are very big! Security camera feeds could also take up lots of space), and you might also want to host for multiple users (for family, friends, or a business)
But yes, _100_TB is a lot. 8-24TB (before memory became super expensive) was reasonable for most consumers, usually in a RAID configuration for redundancy. Multiple smaller drives are more reliable and modular than a single big one!
Without going into video media, I've got around 2-3TB of photos (in RAW format) and my ripped/downloaded music collection is about the same size. Probably got about 5TB of device backups and a similar amount of retro games ROMs/disk images
I think between my desktop PC and server I've got about 70-80TB of storage (though not all of it is usable for redundancy)
I could see myself building a new NAS in a couple of years that would make use of a few of those drives if the economics work out
These numbers feel unreal. How long does zeroing a 65TB drive take?
would probably take like 2 to 3 days to write zeros across the entire disk. but hardware or software based full disk encryption can make 'erasing' a disk (make the data irretrievable) very fast.
Nice. I switched from WD to Toshiba in 2024