4% is hardly a spike in the scheme of things. That’s just inflation when things aren’t really coming down in price any more.
I bought a drive a year or so ago and was surprised how expensive it was. At some point the price just stopped dropping. Presumably there’s a limit on how cheap you can make a spinning rust drive before it just doesn’t work any more.
It seems like I’ll soon have to use my DVD burner yet again. Now only if I found one for my ThinkPad, as it’s one of the last models that still had an option for it.
Economic policies will start shifting to inflation reducing by raising interest rates. This is purely inflationary in all economies and it’s hilariously going to tank stock trading.
Remember when buying a PC was semi-affordable? That was nice. Now it’s transitioning into a luxury product.
For the vast part of the world, that is not the us or the EU, a Pc, specially a very powerful one like for gaming, has always been an expensive luxury item. You’re just joining the club late.
I was waiting for them to come down in order to get another for my NAS. Now they’re gonna go up again instead. Fuck me
This isn’t a huge increase. It’s not on the order of what just happened with RAM.
According to a report from Digitimes Asia (quoting Nikkei), HDD contract prices jumped roughly 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025.
It sounds conspiratorial to say it seems like they are trying to crash the consumer market so that computing will be entirely dependent on their services, but I mean…
They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.
It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
If the demand increases enough, more factories will be built. Right?
Except most people think it’s a bubble, so won’t risk building and the cost to build factories that technical is so large that most big companies outsource it, never mind new entrants.
I suspect instead well move more towards a data on demand kind of thing. We don’t need the same thing stored in millions of copies worldwide. Cheaper connectivity and containerization should help, I’d think.
It will start with rarely used large files like isos, which are already pretty efficiently distributed but then move to more and more, like cdns do for web already.
I’m just hypothesizing…I’ve nothing to base it on, but it seems redundant to have so much duplication.
It’s because the average USA citizen is economically irrelevant. The money is in the top 10% and the big corpos, especially AI with all the money sloshing around there. The 90% consumer market doesn’t matter as much these days.
As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.
Guess I waited a hair too long to pull the trigger on a NAS setup
I needed to buy another 20TB drive. I paid 100$ more for THE SAME MODEL i bought two years ago.
My thoughts exactly, but it’s only going to get worse :/
All of this just to automate the process of enslaving the world.
Due to “human rights” laws, we have to pay the slaves these days!
In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.
I’ve been putting off building a new pc. More and more it looks like my 10 year old machine has got a few more years left in it.
I just built an am4 machine from mostly old parts I had kicking around. Was happy I went a little to crazy a few years ago. No way I’d of been able to do it with prices now
Yeah, my trick is to save up and try to buy the 2nd best components as much as possible. The very best will always have a shiny new thing tax attached to them, but 2nd best is where the real value comes in. Granted I’m not building gaming pcs, so this isn’t too unreasonable. The current market won’t let me get close to what I’d actually like though.
eBay helps too. I picked up 16gb of ddr4 ram for someone the other day for $40 and got myself a cpu cooler for my build for $60 less than brand new. It was just open box so basically new. Takes patience but there are still deals to be found out there.
My ten year old former Win10 gaming PC was recently reborn as a CachyOS Linux gaming PC, and I just finished playing through Clair Obscur on it. I did have to upgrade the video card, but I got the RTX 5050, well within your “second best” range target, since it’s technically their budget level card.
First SSDs and now HDDs too?
Well if you can’t get SSDs, what are you going to use for storage? I doubt tape drives are best as daily drivers.
My old pack of floppy drives is going to make me rich!
The bubble cannot burst fast enough. I’m tired of these higher hardware costs because of a feature that nobody wants.
It’s not really something that no one wants though… Lemmy is loudly against it, but in real life we have tons of people actually asking for it all the time. Hell at work they had to setup a company AI provider account because people using their own subscriptions was happening too much.
My fear is that this is only going to become the new pricing floor. Someone suggested that these companies are going to systematically scoop up nearly all remaining tech in an attempt to sell cloud computing etc as the only option for the average consumer (due to lack of affordable or perhaps even available tech)…
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out they don’t want us having any access to our own computers etc because they can only control so much of what we can do with them.
I’m saving up now to afford the lease on a nice certified pre-owned Dell in a couple years. My buddy Dave works over at the dealership so I should be able to lock in a good rate. And hey, with their super lease-to-own options maybe I’ll be able to keep it at the end! That’d be nice you know… something to hand down to the kids when they’re old enough for their computing license. Fingers crossed! 🤞
I wish all of our infrastructure weren’t built around needing computers. I’m lucky my small community is typewriter-friendly, so I can get most of my daily tasks done without ever getting behind the wheel of a mouse.
We’re going backwards in time. Computers use to cost multi thousand dollars and you needed a loan to buy one.
A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.
We’ve had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.
Now it’s supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don’t think it’ll end.
A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn’t even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we’ll see improvement.
OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components’ prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That’s good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.
I’ve read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That’s a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).
So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing “content” from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I’d want. Including production, standards and everything.
Hosting a federated site on calculators and old gaming consoles to become trendy
Optical drives next I guess lol
What’s even going on anymore
I read news of SATA SSDs spiking in price just a few hours ago. Gonna go to sleep now, expecting a spike in floppy disk prices when I wake up and punch cards tomorrow evening.
Didn’t Samsung say that they weren’t making consumer Sata ssds anymore? Jfc we really are going to the whole “you own nothing”.
Unless they use IP to prevent new producers from entering the market, there should be a response eventually.
HDDs are precision machinery, of course, but not lost alien technology only old big companies can make.
How tf are hdds going up in price
Did the data centers somehow buy up all the sdds and decided nah we need more, lets buy up all the hdds too
Like ???
At this rate i gotta start grabbing my old drives to reuse because apparently 2010 equipment is back on the plate or smth
It’s all about the Pentiums!
