Not until somebody shuts off the investor money faucet for AI. Then they'll come crawling back — although inevitably not until after they go whining to all the world's governments about wanting a bailout.

But hey, look at the bright side. We've already had the cryptocurrency mining boom and bust, and "AI" boom and soon to be bust. There's still time for some idiot to invent the next tech scam fad which will conveniently require a shitload of hardware for no recognizably useful purpose.

No, and it's by design.

You're gonna lease a tablet and use cloud-based storage services and like it.

The dystopia is here.

140 TB is a whole heck of a lot of movies and TV shows

Does data take up less room when it's being used by AI?

Normal consumers can install jellyfin. At some point they'll make downloading a crime, they wouldn't hurt people to have a decent collection of stuff ready for that day.

Is there a Lemmy community for trading surplus hardware yet?

I have a pile of HDDs and servers that I no longer use. I've transitioned almost all mine to 20tb+. I might have 8 or 10 4tb REDs laying around. They're old, probably have thousands of power on hours in the smart data though.

I set up a community on midwest.social and the lemmy.world one is dead (because I'm in the midwest) !homelabsales@midwest.social

8TB? That’s my ideal RAM configuration lol. ;-)

Ten years from now...

Amazon search: "hard drive"

Result: 4TB $198

Not a clue. Care to eli5?

My Z2 had à drive failure recently, with 4To drives. Took me almost 3 days to re-silver the array 😅. fortunately had a hot spare setup, so it started as soon as it failed, but now a second drive is showing signs of failing soon, so I had to pay the AI tax (168€) to get one asap (arriving Monday), as well as a second one, cheaper (around 120€), but which won't arrive until the end of April.

At some point a drive can get TOO big

I was thinking the same. I would hate to toast a 140 TB drive. I think I'd just sit right down and cry. I'll stick with my 10 TB drives.

It doesn't really matter, the current limitations are not so much data density at rest, but getting the data in and out at a useful speed. We breached the capacity barrier long ago with disk arrays.

SATA will no longer be improved, we now need u.2 designs for data transport that are designed for storage. This exists, but needs to filter down through industrial application to get to us plebs.

Shrimp platters.

If you have to ask, you can't afford it 😭

Going by the usual trends of $20+/tb, I'd say. fuckin expensive

And if it breaks at 10 months and they take another 2 to send your replacement back, well, they no longer need to send one that actually works this time either

The point is the need for more and more data storage is never going to stop.

The point is that 8TB are too small, and not enough for my anime.

Archive.org, Anna's archive, Jan 6 footage, Epstein files, there's plenty to back up.

With useful stuff? Never. With random bullshit I think might be useful some day if only I find the time? Easy

@Fmstrat @veeesix Since there's two very diffrent questions there.. The first, "where do the failures happen?": anywhere. It could be the controller dying (in which case the platters themselves are fine if you replace the board, but otherwise the whole thing is toast). It could be the head breaking. It could be issues with a specific platter. It could be something that affects _all_ the platters (like dust getting inside the sealed area). So basically, it very much depends.