[karlkloss]

And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market. Save your money now and be prepared.

[Nux]

GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.

[HugoTea]

Depends how it goes down, if a company goes into insolvency all security policies are off the table and random hardware can get shifted into lot bidding.

[pmontra]

HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.

There is also encryption at rest.

[bigbuppo]

Nah, the liquidators aren't going to care about that. Those hard drives are going to be shipped out with all your wildest porn chat bot fantasies.

[archagon]

I believe many enterprise drives have instant-erase functionality (presumably deleting an encryption key).

[downrightmike]

new HDD have a SHA key built in that can be erased without zeroing out the drive. it just creates a new key and boom, free disk

[microtherion]

My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground. Are AI usage practices different?

[trenchpilgrim]

> My understanding is that refurbished GPUs from e.g. crypto mining are something people are warned away from, because they've often been run into the ground.

No, this wasn't the case. While there were never comprehensive studies various tech media purchased these cards to run testing and found that, other than scammers, they all performed to expectation.

[PeaceTed]

It was considered a fear but I don't know if there is much truth to it. The fans and capacitors would give out long before the silicon.

Even if it say, halved the life span of the chips, that is still far longer than what most people would ever use them for.

[mschuster91]

> And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market.

GPUs? No way. The datacenter cards don't even have video output ports, and I think the chips destined for AI / ML training also have everything video/render related removed from the silicon, makes for more yield.

And the other way around, using (cheap) consumer GPUs in servers, I think at least NVDA tries to prevent that with driver-based DRM, so there won't be any flooding coming from there either.

[esseph]

If this bubble pops you might need that money for food when bananas go from $1.50 to $150.00