Posted on 02/15/2026 10:21:13 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Western Digital has run out of Hard Disk Drive capacity through 2026, with CEO Irving Tan confirming the company is sold out to its top customers as artificial intelligence and enterprise demand consumes storage at unprecedented levels. The shortage has driven HDD prices to their highest point in two years, according to wccftech.com, which reported on Western Digital's Q2 earnings call.
Firm orders through 2028
Speaking during the company's Q2 earnings call, Tan revealed the extent of Western Digital's committed capacity. "As we highlighted, we're pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers. And we've also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028," he said. These long-term agreements combine both volume commitments measured in exabytes and pricing structures.
The shortage reflects a fundamental shift in Western Digital's business model. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of total revenue, whilst consumer revenue has dropped to just 5%. This dramatic change highlights how AI infrastructure demand is reshaping the storage industry.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at tbreak.com ...
Amazon wants $1200 for the 64g my Alienware uses.
For shiggles I went and “ built” my laptop specs •now• and it was almost 7k.
Holy carp.
I got it as a free warranty replacement thank God.
😳
Probably for things like Surface tablets.
Mine have 16g but I got them long before this madness happened.
It’s destroying me with my electric bills.
😢
I kept bunch of PC magazines from the mid 90s and they’re hilarious now.
I remember my Commodore 64, and at the time thinking, that’s more memory than anyone will ever need, LOL!
“24TB Seagate”
/wipes drool from chin
Yes, because the price of RAM has escalated by 4 times since December. If you go to Costco and look over their selection of computers, all the lower end models have just 16GB of memory. Only one computer that they have with 32GB is less than $900.
But of course, if you get lower speed DDR4 the price is a lot less. The real escalation has been in DDR5. An off brand 8GB sick of DDR4 is currently around $60.
😁
Back in very early 90s, the hubby I had then bought a PC for like $3k.
He spent a week typing in tons of code and command lines for some really primitive game.
The monitor was a tiny BW vdu.
There were 5 1/4 floppies everywhere.
He had a daisy wheel printer
In retrospect it was just pitiful.
PONG was more impressive.
I remember writing my first program on the TRS-80 and saving it to a cassette player.
/wipes drool from chin
I bought external 24TB hard drives straight from Seagate for about $250 a piece with shipping if I remember correctly. One of the forums had pasts saying that the drives were on clearance because they had a large number of surplus data center drives, they were trying to get rid of. When I pulled them out of the cases the serial numbers confirmed this as did the firmware, but they came with only 1-year warranties.
I have them installed in a cheap NAS enclosure and I have been pretty happy with the speed that they give me when the computers accessing them are hooked to a cat 5 cable. I may upgrade my routers and cabling to get better performance, but they still work amazingly well even when the computer is communicating over WiFi. And I feel secure knowing that I have redundancy with the RAID.
Why is so much storage needed? And for AI?>>> AI is all data. The software might be fancy like a new search engine but without the data you have just artificial.
Suddenly I miss the old Vortex video game they had in a local dive bar
A&P used to be open 24/7 and they had Space Invaders, Missile command and PAC-Man.
Wow.
😳😳😳😳
Mine was not to a TRS-80, but I did in fact do that save to tape more than once.
I have a few random tapes from those days still.
I have thought about playing them for “https://www.shazam.com/” just to see if they are recognized.
btw if you have lots of disk space you can download all the old dos games
Covering 4 decades and 7633 MS-DOS games (so far), eXoDOS is ready to play, including manuals, videos, and extra content.
There’s a “media add-on pack”, 220gb of scans and rips of Magazines, Books, Catalogues, Soundtracks, and TV Shows\Documentaries related to the MS-DOS games era
https://www.retro-exo.com/exodos.html
Holy carp.
My HS boyfriend’s sister worked in a data center that used huge spools of tape and punch cards.
I still have no idea what she was doing.
I remember getting a calculator and thinking I was a space age whiz kid.
😑
I bought a 4T external HDD last night for $30. I’m going to be very interested to see if it truly has that capacity.
Nice Joe Walsh reference there.
My friends stopped playing the board game RISKwith me because I always won
Years later I bought the PC version and that sneaking computer “brain”used the exact same strategy/path that I did and I couldn’t win.
😕
They never do.
Really ticks me off.
None of my 160g iPods ever had more than 147 g
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