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Morbus posted:incidentally, disk (and probably SSD) prices may be sharply elevated in the near future and remain that way for a while. You may want to consider that if you plan on a significant refresh in the next year. Interesting, do you have more info on this?
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Apr 23, 2024 16:44
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| # ? May 6, 2024 02:46 |
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Kaddish posted:Interesting, do you have more info on this? There were multiple factors that caused HDD manufactures to scale back production from around 2022-present. For one, the majority of HDD demand is from large cloud companies, and they increased their orders and their forecasts during the pandemic. This spurred an increase in capacity, followed by pretty severe overcapacity when google, microsoft, amazon, meta et al all missed their forecasts. That, plus higher interest rates and a general tech downturn meant cuts in factory capacity (and elsewhere) to mitigate losses, which were still pretty severe. Second, all the AI hype meant those same companies rebalanced their (now more constrained) budgets to spend a lot more money on compute. Planned refreshes and expansions on the storage side were deferred, and in some cases orders already placed were cancelled. Guidance from these same companies on future orders also become murky/non-existent. Since the long term storage demand from hyperscalers never really changed (and, if anything, has increased due to generative AI). this was all sort of transient. But the result is that demand is recovering in an environment where there is less factory capacity and firmer pricing. The transition to HAMR is also having some effects, but that is maybe another topic. The tl;dr is that for the largest 30+ TB drives, there are additional manufacturing volume constraints, and this will probably be most acute for the next year or so before recovering. The situation with SSD is similar on the big picture level. In some ways it's better, since SSD benefitted more from AI (but still much less than compute). In other ways it's worse, since flash capacity is enormously more expensive and time consuming to ramp up, and lead times on those wafers are extremely long. The flash manufacturing market is more competitive/crowded than HDD, though, so that smooths things out a little.
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May 2, 2024 19:55
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