Hard Drive Shortage Intensifies as AI Training Data Pushes Lead Times Beyond 12 Months (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0179264510
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/1823230/hard-drive-shortage-intensifies-as-ai-training-data-pushes-lead-times-beyond-12-months
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/expect-hdd-ssd-shortages-as-ai-rewrites-the-rules-of-storage-hierarchy-multiple-companies-announce-price-hikes-too
The shortage stems from AI infrastructure requirements including training datasets, model checkpoints and inference logs that consume petabytes of storage space. These files are too large for primary SSD storage but must remain accessible for quick retrieval. Hard drive manufacturers have not significantly expanded production capacity in approximately a decade. Cloud service providers are evaluating QLC SSDs for cold data storage despite costs remaining four to five times higher per gigabyte than mechanical drives. Memory suppliers are developing SSD products specifically for this intermediate storage tier.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/expect-hdd-ssd-shortages-as-ai-rewrites-the-rules-of-storage-hierarchy-multiple-companies-announce-price-hikes-too
Not for long (Score:1)
The market will clear, when a huge provider snaps up a large percentage of every little player's clients. Or municipalities tire of selling scarce power to people who don't vote in their elections. It's an analog of waves of bank failures. Too much compute; quicker than too much money.
"developing products"? (Score:2)
While I welcome our cheaper but slower SSD overlords, isn't the storage the price driver?
Would 4TB of NAND (or whatever) care what you wrap around it?
Re: (Score:2)
I think the "developing products" in the summary is a big of a miss statement. I was at Flash Memory Summit (now Future Memory Summit) and a lot of the noise is other storage than NAND. Nothing yet compelling, but everyone is trying. A lot of this is that NAND is not staying still. A couple of vendors are likely to introduce PLC (5 level cells) as shipping solutions as early as next year, and for a lot of workloads, they are quite capable.
More production usually means low prices (Score:2)
But apparently WesternDigital also wants its share of the AI pie by increasing their prices.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes everything looks like a conspiracy to the short sighted. The reality is there was zero reason to expand HDD production at a time when more and more data storage requirements trended towards SSDs. Sales of HDDs have plummeted since their peak in 2010, and it sure as heck isn't worth attempting to predict a bubble 3 years out and investing $1bn to expand HDD production because maybe some AI techbros will briefly hoover up data before their industry implodes.
Too large? (Score:2)
> These files are too large for primary SSD storage but must remain accessible for quick retrieval
I think you mean "not used often enough to warrant the price of SSD storage" not "too large for SSD storage."
If you think a multi-petabyte file is too big to fit on SSD storage: combining multiple physical storage devices into one virtual device has been a thing for a long time now.
Re: (Score:3)
it's indeed weird, they're throwing money around like crazy for the training race, why would they bother with even a 200% cost increase for storage? not to mention that ssd is cheaper energy wise in the long run.
i have not looked at the figures, but maybe the increased production times have to do with production capacity or supply chain problems?
Re: (Score:3)
You need to do the math.
1. QLC SSDs are roughtly 4X the cost of HDD for a given amount of space.
2. While power is lower for SSDs, the cost savings does not even come close to the up front cost.
2a. The power for storage is literally in the noise compared to the GPU/AI compute power requirements.
3. The "other option" would be to use more older (ie smaller) HDDs, and even off-lease mining HDDs, not QLC SSDs.
4. NAND capacity is limited like HDD capacity in terms if exabytes. HDDs are still larger, althoug
Re: (Score:2)
Idle power for HDDs can be very low if the spindles are not kept spinning. For training that takes many days, according occasional HDD spin up times of 10 seconds may be acceptable. In that case, it's basically only the HDD electronics board that is powered. And when comparing similar capacities, multiple SSDs are needed to equal the capacity of one HDD, so it's not clear that in idle mode SSDs consume less power than HDDs.