Hard drives already sold out for this year – AI to blame
- Reference: 1771596019
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/20/ai_blamed_again_as_hard_drives_sell_out/
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Seagate and Western Digital, two of the Big Three makers of rotating disk drives, confirmed during recent earnings conference calls that they have already flogged all of their manufacturing output.
Western Digital chief Tiang Yew Tan told analysts "We're pretty much sold out for calendar '26. We have firm purchase orders with our top seven customers. And we've also established long term agreements with two of them for calendar year '27 and one of them for calendar year '28."
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Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said on his own company’s call: "Our nearline capacity is fully allocated through calendar year 2026, and we expect to begin accepting orders for the first half of calendar year 2027 in the coming months… additionally, multiple cloud customers are discussing their demand growth projections for calendar 2028, underscoring that supply assurance remains their highest priority."
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Great for WD and Seagate. Not so much for eveveryone else.
It is understood that the third major disk producer, Toshiba, is likely to be in a similar situation. We asked the drive maker and will update if we get an answer.
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Hard drives have pretty much been displaced from everyday PCs and laptops, but the makers continue to bump up their capacities, making them attractive for applications requiring large volumes of data storage at low cost – such as cloud storage and AI training. Western Digital [5]recently announced it will ship 44 TB drives this year, for example, with a roadmap to 100 TB by 2029.
What are the implications for this impending shortage? "In my view this means no meaningful open production remains for discretionary buyers except the hyperscalers," said Sid Nag, President and Chief Research Officer at Tekonyx.
"I am guessing these include locked-in purchase agreements extending into 2027 and 2028 for certain customers including those building AI datacenters. So there should be no impact to that business. This also implies HDD manufacturing capacity is now almost exclusively prioritized for large AI/cloud players because of predictable, high-volume demand," Nag told us.
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"This will, however, impact the mid-size market who depend on server technology."
Omdia Senior Research Director for Enterprise Infrastructure Vlad Galabov agreed.
"I think it will be a very tough year for the standard enterprise general purpose server and for enterprise storage. We have downgraded our forecast for those markets," Galabov told The Register .
Despite this, Omdia raised its overall 2026 server spend forecast to $590 billion and its datacenter capex forecast to more than $1 trillion because the top ten cloud providers keep upping their investment plans.
Corporate IT projects will likely take a hit if they were counting on using hard drives as a capacity tier in their storage plans, but there are already shortages of [7]DRAM and NAND flash silicon, the latter used in solid state drives (SSDs) – all due to AI-driven demand putting a strain on supply chains.
"We are seeing shortages of memory, storage and [8]even CPU silicon and all of these will be dynamically affecting each other for some significant time based on announced capex spend and (datacenter) land leases," said IDC's senior research director for European Enterprise Infrastructure, Andrew Buss.
[9]Don't believe the hyperscalers! AI can't cure the climate crisis
[10]Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy
[11]As memory shortage persists, vendor price quotes are not long remembered
[12]Secondhand laptop market goes 'mainstream' amid memory crunch
"The growth of AI demands storage, and lots of it, and also networking to move the stored data around, so expect there to also be high-performance networking shortages as well going forwards. And with next-generation Rubin GPUs apparently needing 20TB+ of fast SSD storage capacity per GPU, this will become even more acute," Buss told us.
"This has been consuming large amounts of fast flash-based NVMe SSDs, and the increase in price and shortage of media is now encouraging many who need storage to reconsider HDDs. We would expect hybrid flash arrays to have a resurgence, but also HDD only arrays where the traffic patterns are suitable," he added.
So it looks like it might be a bad year for a server refresh, unless you happen to be one of the hyperscalers, with shortages and price hikes affecting many components.
Omdia forecasts the top ten cloud service providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, CoreWeave, ByteDance, xAI, Alibaba, and Tencent) to account for more than 70 percent of the server capex this year and AI-optimized servers for 80 percent of the total server spend. ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aZiTNs83fUqKMiMkGKOHvgAAA8M&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZiTNs83fUqKMiMkGKOHvgAAA8M&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZiTNs83fUqKMiMkGKOHvgAAA8M&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aZiTNs83fUqKMiMkGKOHvgAAA8M&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.blocksandfiles.com/disk/2026/02/18/platters-wd-new-disk-drive-tech-hits-lucky-14/4091399
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZiTNs83fUqKMiMkGKOHvgAAA8M&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/02/dram_prices_expected_to_double/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/server_cpus_memory_shortage/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/19/ai_climate_crisis_claims/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/ai_memory_router_prices/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/memory_shortage_persists_vendor_change_terms/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/refurbished_pcs_memory_crunch/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: And people thought the egg shortage was bad in the US
If I were an entrepreneurial type, I'd spend the afternoon investing in a good chunk of HDDs that can still be found in the retail channel. Sit on them for six months, and they'll be worth at least twice as much.
I still use HDDs.
Am I alone? How many of you lot do?
Re: I still use HDDs.
I have four portable HDDs in regular use at home (two dedicated to TimeMachine daily backups, one for a monthly clone, one for local archiving). I also have a fifth drive on the local network as a temporary backup where needed, plus two old drives I use for an annual backup.
I also have four SDDs in regular use (a Thunderbolt 4 one as a working drive when editing video, on for monthly backups of key folders, one for recording video and one as a general purpose EDC drive) - but you didn't ask about SDDs, so don't bother reading this paragraph!
Possibly overkill but, having (more than once) had to address a company who didn't have a reliable backup when their server crashed, I prefer to cover bases. The monthly backup/clone drives are kept in a safe when not actually in use, and the annual backup drives are kept away from the house. Oh, and all my current working files are mirrored to the cloud for syncing to my phone and tablet when needed.
Re: I still use HDDs.
8 by 4TB in the Drobo.
4 by 3TB in the Mac (RAID 10).
2 by 1TB also in the Mac as system & image.
A few spares in external drive bays… just in case.
Re: I still use HDDs.
I think I can reveal that not only do I have HDDs, but also an FDD: 'Just in case'. No floppy disks, though there may/will be some lurking in the box of 'essentials'. Box? Boxes.
Come on! I'm not the only one. Am I?
Time to use 7zip again. Although you need more RAM for the maximum compression... oh wait...
HHDs are stil used in high-capacity/low cost NAS
When you need near-line high-capacty low-.cost NAS systems, HDDs are still an attractive solution, all flash systems are still more expensive - and even more now.
Yet if sourcing HDDs becomes an issue too, the months ahead looks quite complex to navigate...
My storage area...
...is starting to look like a second-hand computer store. Now, not only do I have gigabytes of memory stored in boxes, I've got terabytes of HDDs (and even some SSDs) stored in a boxes as well. The memory "shortage" I understand in the context of AI gobbling-up capacity, but the HDD issue was a surprise. I guess I was thinking of solid state storage for AI systems rather than spinning rust, but of course that was short-sighted of me. I'm just not sure what the heck to do with all this surplus hardware.
And people thought the egg shortage was bad in the US
At least egg prices *only* doubled during the avian flu bird epidemic for a couple years. Memory has quadrupled and I guess the sky is going to be the limit on HDD's.