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sireat | 13 days ago

After, RAM, SSD, GPUs, now HDDs what else is there left to sell out? Power supplies, fans?

In a way this feels a bit absurd for these AI centers to hog HDDs.

As pointed by others neither training nor inference require HDDs and storing raw data should not require that much.

So my hypothesis is that it is a double whammy of overall declining consumer sided HDD demand, leaving data centers as main source of demand and additional demand from the new AI centers.

I feel like the AI centers are just buying HDDs because why not throw a HDD in each server blade even if there is no need? The money is there to be spent and it must be spent.

As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

I will end with an imperfect analogy with multiplayer gaming. It is quite common in multiplayer games for higher level players to wish to acquire some tradeskill they neglected to acquire earlier. maybe a new quest appears, or new "must have" item that requires such skill.

They (past me included) have too much game money and no wish to acquire tradeskill items slowly. So the "rich" will overpay by 2x or 10x or even 100x the usual price.

That is free market at work right?

In the process whole low level economy is destroyed due to 2nd order effects. Meaning a new player starting out can only be a farmer.

So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?

discuss

order

zozbot234|13 days ago

> As someone who has been building computers since 1989 it feels like end of personal hobby casual building.

We have a long way to go before the average PC costs even half as much as it did in 1989 (adjusted for inflation). And of course the performance for typical consumer use is orders of magnitude better than it was back then.

ls612|12 days ago

My parents love to tell me how in either late 1997 or early 1998 they bought the first PC for our family, a Compaq with a Pentium 3, 12 GB hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and no graphics acceleration at all beyond whatever was integrated on the Pentium 3. It cost $2000 back then so probably almost $4000 today. My high end 4090 rig cost a bit more than that to build for comparison and that machine is better than 98% of machines out there today.

hattmall|12 days ago

>So if a student comes to me wishing to start building computers what advice do I give them? Farm something?

Buy used stuff? 99.9% of consumers have no need for anywhere near the cutting edge tech. I do far more than most people and get by just fine with a workstation I bought used in 2014. My newest Laptop is ~2018 and that was only because I wanted something with 4K that I could flip to tablet.

Raspberry PI's, SOCS, Microcontrollers, there's a million things today that are awesome. Are hobbyist students needing to build datacenters!?

carefree-bob|12 days ago

Most of the computers I buy are refurbished or used models, I've never had a bad experience. Especially now, when computers are not getting much better whereas prices are increasing faster than performance.

brikym|12 days ago

Gas turbines