Posted on 02/18/2026 10:42:47 PM PST by dennisw
However, this is going to be bad news for enthusiasts and consumers. Although many people prefer SSDs for most electronics, there is still a market for consumer hard drives, especially for use in NAS systems and long-term data storage. But the massive demand brought by the AI infrastructure buildout is causing shortages even for this component. Many HDD models have surged in pricing already, with costs jumping by an average of 46% since September 2025.
PC hardware shortages are only getting worse as the AI race continues. What started as a memory and storage chip shortage has soon spread into GPUs and is now hitting hard drives. Most consumers won’t feel the HDD pinch as it’s mostly a niche product in recent years, but we’re afraid that other parts, components, and product categories are going to follow suit with the price increases and supply shortages in the coming months.
Will HDDs follow RAM and SSDs when it comes to price increases?
Western Digital Chief Executive Officer Irving Tan said that the company has already sold out of hard drives for 2026. Tan confirmed this during the company’s Q2 2026 earnings call, where, according to the transcript shared by Investing.com, he also confirmed that there are already some long-term agreements (LTAs) in place for the next couple of years.
“As we highlighted, we’re pretty much sold out for calendar 2026. We have firm POs with our top seven customers,” the executive said. “And we’ve also established LTAs with two of them for calendar 2027 and one of them for calendar 2028. Obviously, these LTAs have a combination of volume of exabytes and price.” This announcement is on track with the report from late last year that hard drives are on backorder for two years due to massive data center demand.
The company’s VP for Investor Relations, Ambrish Srivastava, said that 89% of its revenue came from its Cloud business, while its consumer business only delivered 5%. Because of this, it would make sense for the company to focus more on enterprise clients — similar to how memory chip makers decided to focus production on the more lucrative HBMs that are in demand from hyperscalers. The cost efficiency of hard drives has especially become more apparent now that SSDs are skyrocketing to more than 16x the price of an equivalent HDD.
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Go see gamers nexus on You tube, where Steven Burke will fill you in on the details. How AI data centers buying up all RAM and NVMe production, are killing gaming at home. Computers at home and businesses. Where we end up with dumb terminals that need to be hooked into AI data farms to work properly.
A dumb terminal = dumb computer
Thank goodness we still have our VT420s! Life is good.
Sony is developing a patent to deal with this by allowing you to download kernels of games, to which data would be downloaded and deleted as you play your game. Supposedly you will only have to store 100MB or so for a 100GB game, instead of having to download the entire 100GB to play the game.
I am glad I finished my desktop build before the AI Bubble. From my limited knowledge, chip and periphery manufacturers are reluctant to expand production thinking this bubble will pop.
To Western Digital: Cut it out. I’m not playing. And i’m not going back to dumb terminals. I had those in college and early in my career.
Elsewhere I might write “kek” but for this one, “DEC”!
!
At one site, we used to run OpenVMS Alpha, the last server being an ES40. Rock solid.
Our VT420s were in storage for about 20 years. Pulled several of them out and powered up - every one powered up and is back in use as terminal devices connected to core routing switches.
it makes little sense to me that anyone still wants to use actual hard drives in massive data centers rather than SSDs: the energy cost to run HDDs plus the energy to cool the dissipated heat is much greater for HDDs vs SSDs ...
not including cooling, SSDs in NAS systems consume roughly three times the energy as SSDs ...
a building full of HDDs also requires bigger, more, and nosier cooling fans plus more AC cooling than SSDs so, if one is providing their own power generation, the power plants have to have several times the capacity for HDDs vs SSDs ...
furthermore, SSDs generally have an MTBF roughly 1.5× to 5× higher than a comparable HDDs ...
and then there’s the issue of rack space, requiring bigger buildings full of HDDs [and fans + AC] vs full of SSDs ...
VT240? What’s that. I only know VT120.
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