SSDs have become significantly more expensive in recent months. But now the prices of hard drives (HDDs) are also rising sharply. The main reason behind this is the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. Because all the data has to be stored somewhere.
Who’s speaking? TrendForce is a company that analyzes companies and data. Now TrendForce explained that the demand for hard drives (HDDs) has been steadily increasing for months. To do this, a lot of company data was looked at. At least that’s what our colleagues at Techradar.com report.
However, 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?
Manufacturers such as Seagate and Western Digital have been raising prices for several weeks and the cost of a large capacity hard drive has risen by around 10%. Manufacturers like Seagate even assume that prices will rise even more in the coming months.
Companies are buying hard drives for artificial intelligence, which is increasing demand
What does this have to do with AI? Most artificial intelligence tasks are handled by graphics cards. But the raw data for answering queries or other data must be stored somewhere. And here companies use large hard drives to store the data and then process it further.
Why does this affect so many products? Since high-capacity hard drives are currently in particular demand for AI systems, producers are changing their priorities: more large hard drives are being produced and fewer small models. This particularly affects players who are looking for an upgrade for their system. Therefore, the prices for HDDs that “only” offer 1, 2 or 4 TB of storage are also rising. And these are the models that currently most often end up in modern gaming systems.
You should therefore assume that the prices for hard drives will increase in the long term. The problem is exacerbated because the prices for SSDs have also been rising sharply for months.
If you still need a new hard drive, an SSD or another storage medium, then you should buy it before the prices rise significantly again.
A special SSD for a lot of money: The manufacturer Apex Storage has presented a special solution here. A storage medium that you can expand with additional storage as you wish. But the whole thing isn’t exactly cheap and is therefore aimed more at professional users.
It costs more than a car – what can an SSD do that costs you up to 20,000 euros?