According to Duann, PC makers have to buy from SSD module makers because NAND vendors reduced allocation to the client/consumer PC market and redirected most NAND supply to data center products.
As a result, PC OEMs like Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP cannot get enough NAND or SSD supply directly from NAND manufacturers and have to turn to module makers for solid-state drives. The latter traditionally served end-users and had plenty of aftermarket products with enhanced performance and cooling, but now they increasingly serve PC makers instead.
Everyday I realize that I don’t hate capitalism enough.
It hasn’t ‘dissapeared’, the demand is still there but we’ve been priced out.
One good thing about it is we’re more inclined to recycle and buy secondhand. Or just make-do if its not essential.
I’ve replaced a decent sized SSD with gigabit internet. Don’t need to store a bunch of huge games locally if it only takes 10 minutes to download them.
:edit: this was clearly a joke. Mostly*. Sorry for forgetting the /s _ *that is pretty much where I’m at these days, since all I have is a 250gb SSD and can’t afford a bigger one.
Not even a good thing globally because we’re not replacing production by recycling and secondhand buying. Production is going stronger and more wasteful than ever, it’s just all absorbed in the AI war.
Very glad I got 4TB before the graph went vertical.
My dumpster dive SELF-built NAS is getting up there. It really needs replacement but I’m waiting. I have three dying drives and a worn ssd in it right now, going to have to bite the bullet and overpay for some refurbished enterprise drives, and a small nvme ssd (2x 4TB and a. 10TB parity drive to be replaced with 2 10TB refurbs). Would have cost about 200 bucks previously (used to pay about 80 bucks for one) but today it’s totaling over 600.
I’ll limp it along for a couple more years anyway but damn, this will cost nearly as much as all the drives I’ve previously purchased.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you triple the price of everything.
2TB drives were about £100 a few years ago and now they’re close to £400. That’s a fuckin’ no from me dog.
That’s what good MLC and TLC costed back in the Win7 EOL days…
Today they are more likely QLC or TLC without dram.
It’s a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the “winner takes all” approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it’s likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.
Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.
It’s not a question of if the party will end, it’s just a question of when. Even if people don’t think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we’re already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.
So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.
So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components.
From where? Data center equipment isn’t really suitable for the home. A used SXM module on an adapter might give you reasonably affordable compute but is completely useless for graphics. Data center memory is often HBM, which you can’t just transplant into your home PC. Getting an EDSFF SSD into your PC might work with an adapter but it’s also going to take up a lot of space.
Plus, there have been cases in the past of companies buying up and destroying the inventory of closing data centers specifically so it doesn’t end up on the market to compete with current products. That might very well repeat.
When the bubble bursts I expect to see a semi-decent supply of high-end hardware for specific use cases. If you have a space for a rack with noisy fans and a 3000 W power draw you’ll be able to build a kick-ass AI inference rig for like 2000 bucks. Or a really fast file server. But I don’t think there’s going to be much in it for people who just want 60 FPS in current games and an SSD those games fit onto. That’ll take another couple years.
I think it’ll be 2030 at the earliest until we see actually interesting consumer hardware from the usual companies. Maybe China will swoop in and deliver something worthwhile in the meantime but I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve actually read that Hynix, Samsung, and Micron are refusing to ramp up production in order to avoid getting left holding the bag. They’ll probably survive if that’s true, but I’d expect basically zero demand for new server hardware for a couple years after the bubble pops, so we might see consumer stuff getting cheaper just because almost all new chips will come our way.
Can’t wait for the LLM bubble to pop and have RAM and SSDs become dirt cheap for at least a short time. I believe that other AI-related applications (machine learning, visual recognition, OCR etc. for robots/drones) are more practical and have good use cases but LLM companies themselves are certainly overvalued.
The worst thing is, the format needed for data centres isn’t compatible with home use. A lot of the ram and SSDs will just be scrapped.
Yeah also when has capitalism ever allowed the poors to benefit from the failures of the rich? Companies have been destroying inventory and throwing out food, in such abundance it makes me sick, for decades. Of course this isn’t a blanket statement, after the dot com pop you could buy multi thousand dollar office chairs for a few hundred, as well as good desks.
But overall, corporations love destroying shit instead of letting the commoners get even a little morsel of it.
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Can’t buy an HDD, Can’t buy an SSD, can’t buy a Blu-ray drive, can’t get head. Can’t have shit.
