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Title: Hard Drive Shortage Intensifies as AI Training Data Pushes Lead Times
Beyond 12 Months

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/...

Lead times for high-capacity hard drives have exceeded 52 weeks as AI
workloads drive unprecedented demand for warm storage that sits between fast
SSDs and offline tape archives, according to TrendForce. Western Digital
notified customers of price increases across its entire hard drive portfolio
citing demand for "every capacity" in its product line. 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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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