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.

You only need a tb or two

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.

If people refuse to pay the prices and use their products then eventually they will run out of money and credit to do so.

Maybe. Depends on the use case.

Tell that to my arr stack

Thanks doc

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....

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 The naysayers keep forgetting that hardware gets old, it wears out and fails, and gets superseded by newer models.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.

Lol

you get me…

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.

Wouldn’t this topic be more appropriate in other communities? Preaching to the choir here.

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

Yes good for you but that's not mandatory

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

I scored some new WD 14tb drives for $120 US last October, and I am glad I did! Was a hell of a deal.

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.

Is that one machine?

You can cross post it?

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.

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.

Ram and HDD prices: 📈

Me: 😭

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

Mhm, waiting for ai bubble to burst so I can upgrade my current rig to something future proof

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.

Why GitLab and Gitea?

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.

Edit: ow.. And you should too!

https://serverpartdeals.com/

You are not wrong that is not mandatory. However, my advice usually for people starting on self hosting that most often than not it is better to over spec a bit more always on HDD, and second the ram. But since prices for ram went to shit, over spec the HDD is still an option for some.

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.

This is exceedingly normal procedure for manufacturing companies, and not limited to tech industry by any means. They know how much they can potentially produce on their lines, if they have predicted customers to fulfill the capacity for a full year they are basically sold out despite not having produced most of it yet.

The company I work for also has "sold out" for several of our factories because we have orders for 110% production capacity on them. Orders are not paid up front, they never are in any industry, it's always paid after delivery usually with a 30-90 days delay (and even more in some cases).

There is nothing spectacularly weird or out of place in the announcement they've made, it's basically standard procedure.

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.

I once thought the same. Started with 3TB usable storage. Now my NAS has 21TB usable storage and it has less than 3TB free space available. Alone my Jellyfin Media uses 7.7TB. Another big factor is my retro game collection. Once you realize what you can do, you use more and more storage.

Okay, to all of you: I get it, more is better, same for me.

But it's still worth starting if you can only get your hands on two used drives to run in raid 1.

Buy from third world then

I have 1 tb usb

Jellyfin and Immich jave stayed as mainstays after like 2 dozen projects I've tried on.
That and a Samba share.

I had purchased first 12TB drive for 4 bay NAS last summer. These are fuckton expensive so couldnt get all 4. I finally saved up and bought 2nd 12TB drive to get to RAID 1 for redundancy. Not even month passed, WD reports no more drives. Shop where I got one reports out of stock. FUCK!

Fuck AI and fuck big tech. I got my 12tb cloud and will give you 0 money in near future.

I did not see the fist so am glad you added the text. Awesome rat!

Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it's likely these won't actually get purchased. They shouldn't reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they'd have to actually sell for a fair price and they'd be concerned that they likely won't get paid for these "reservations".

Buy old servers.

How old are we talking?

Punch cards are cheap.

You can still go with unraid and buy more, smaller drives. Buy used SAS drives and an HBA. I recently bought a refurbished Dell optiplex with 32 gigs of ram and some i5 processor off eBay for 100€. SAS drives are really loud and consume more energy than consumer HDDs, but they last very long and are way cheaper.

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.