SSDs have been significantly more expensive for several months. But now prices for hard drives (HDDs) are also rising sharply. This is mainly due to the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. Because somewhere all that data needs to be stored.
Who is speaking? TrendForce is a company that analyzes businesses and data. Now, TrendForce announced that the demand for hard drives (HDDs) has been steadily increasing for months. They have looked at a lot of corporate data. At least, that’s what the colleagues from Techradar.com report.
The high demand for large hard drives is also driving up the prices of the products. And not only HDDs are affected, but also SSDs.
What problems are there?
- The demand for high-capacity hard drives is currently rising sharply and is significantly above the supply. This is partly due to the fact that some manufacturers had scaled back production for storage products.
- According to analysts, the current supply bottlenecks for higher-capacity models are expected to last for months, which could lead to rising prices.
- Furthermore, the global inflationary pressure is quite high. This is also pushing prices up at the moment.
Manufacturers like Seagate or Western Digital have been raising prices for several weeks, and the cost of a high-capacity hard drive has increased by about 10%. Seagate even expects that prices will rise even more sharply in the coming months.
Companies are buying hard drives for Artificial Intelligence, which increases demand
What does this have to do with AI? Most tasks of artificial intelligence are processed via graphics cards. But the raw data for answering queries or other data needs to be stored somewhere. And here, companies are using large hard drives to store data and then process it further.
Why does this affect so many products? Since hard drives with high capacity are currently in demand for AI systems, producers are shifting their priorities: therefore, more large hard drives are being manufactured and fewer small models. This particularly affects gamers who are looking for an upgrade for their system. As a result, the prices for HDDs that offer “only” 1, 2, or 4 TB of storage are rising as well. And these are the models that currently end up most often in modern gaming systems.
You should therefore assume that prices for hard drives will rise in the long term. The problem is further exacerbated, because prices for SSDs have also been steadily rising for months.
If you need a new hard drive, an SSD, or another storage medium, you should act before prices rise significantly again.
A special SSD for a lot of money: The manufacturer Apex Storage has introduced a special solution here. A storage medium that you can expand with additional storage as you wish. However, this is not exactly cheap and is therefore aimed more at professional users.
It costs more than a car – What can an SSD that costs you up to 20,000 euros do?
