WATCH OUT FOR RAM PRICES!

WATCH OUT FOR RAM PRICES!​

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Too late. We've already been run over. LOL

AK6DN said:

Not just RAM ... magnetic disk drives also are going to be in short supply ....

AI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year

: Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs

www.theregister.com

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Of course this makes sense as people are going to look for alternatives to silicon.

AK6DN said:

Not just RAM ... magnetic disk drives also are going to be in short supply ....

AI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year

: Oh snap! The hyperscalers bought all the HDDs

www.theregister.com

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I need to get a couple just to have I guess, same with a couple of M.2 Drives. Gotta come up with the money somehow.

RazorKat83 said:

I need to get a couple just to have I guess, same with a couple of M.2 Drives. Gotta come up with the money somehow.

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I suspect that the more people buy at these outrageous prices the more they will remain outrageous. Myself, I refuse to buy anymore brand new silicon. I will purchase USED until the prices are reasonable. If they never get reasonable again I'm fine with that also. Mechanical drives are more sensible for storage because they last longer. This has been proven time and time again. SSDs are good for operating systems. Even used SSDs can last a long time if the grunt work is left to the mechanical drive. Same goes for GPUs, CPUs, and RAM. Plenty of used material and much of it is backed with customer protection policies. If the corporation wants to charge the domestic end user the same prices they charge the establishments that already got rich off the end users then fine, let the wealthy keep feeding the flames. Frankly, I hope they all go bankrupt.

Scannerman said:

Yup. I kinda stated that already. Anything that uses silicon. You can count on CPUs going up in price too.

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Agreed 100%

Last night @ Walmart, I noticed a brand new laptop with 4GB of ram . . . 4GB . . . for Windows 11 . . . I didn't bother looking at what the CPU was.

Scannerman said:

I suspect that the more people buy at these outrageous prices the more they will remain outrageous. Myself, I refuse to buy anymore brand new silicon. I will purchase USED until the prices are reasonable. If they never get reasonable again I'm fine with that also. Mechanical drives are more sensible for storage because they last longer. This has been proven time and time again. SSDs are good for operating systems. Even used SSDs can last a long time if the grunt work is left to the mechanical drive. Same goes for GPUs, CPUs, and RAM. Plenty of used material and much of it is backed with customer protection policies. If the corporation wants to charge the domestic end user the same prices they charge the establishments that already got rich off the end users then fine, let the wealthy keep feeding the flames. Frankly, I hope they all go bankrupt.

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yeah, that's what I meant was buying used things. I don't care about the silicon. I'm not upgrading to 26H1 anytime soon.

Scannerman said:

Mechanical drives are more sensible for storage because they last longer. This has been proven time and time again. SSDs are good for operating systems. Even used SSDs can last a long time if the grunt work is left to the mechanical drive. Same goes for GPUs, CPUs, and RAM.

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I have not had a mechanical drive fail on me since the 1990's and it was a 150MB drive that came in the only "factory" built computer I ever bought. I replaced it with a 350MB that cost a small fortune. Every drive since then just got outgrown. And I'm still using the first SSD I ever bought that's 120GB for Windows XP. I also always leave my PC's on 24/7

Scannerman said:

Of course this makes sense as people are going to look for alternatives to silicon.

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Data Centers for AI use lots of storage - Petabytes. Last I worked on Petabytes of storage, we used HDD cache to magnetic tape (this was not that long ago). HDD is still cheaper than SSD (I think) so this saves them money.

RazorKat83 said:

yeah, that's what I meant was buying used things. I don't care about the silicon. I'm not upgrading to 26H1 anytime soon.

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Your GFX card - silicon. Your SSDs - silicon. Your RAM - silicon. Your NVMe - silicon. Your CPU - silicon. All the silicon based manufacturers are jumping on the AI band wagon of "silicon supply" rationale to maximize their profits. We have two choices: Support the narrative or find an alternative. I don't think anyone needs to advance to the latest "greatest" OS unless they really need to stay on board with AI. Fortunately for me, I don't need AI and Linux lightens the load. The alternatives are out there. Sadly, the majority of people won't take advantage of them. Instead they will adopt the expensively "easy" example and the Jensons of this world know it.

john1955 said:

I have not had a mechanical drive fail on me since the 1990's and it was a 150MB drive that came in the only "factory" built computer I ever bought. I replaced it with a 350MB that cost a small fortune. Every drive since then just got outgrown. And I'm still using the first SSD I ever bought that's 120GB for Windows XP. I also always leave my PC's on 24/7

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I wish I could say the same. I've had more than a few SSDs brick on me so far but a good quality mechanical drive can easily last a decade. I also run my PCs 24/7 for the most part. The mechanical hard drives that have died on me were almost always budget drives. It has been my experience that a good mechanical hard drive will handle exponentially more rewrites than a typical SSD.

john1955 said:

I have not had a mechanical drive fail on me since the 1990's and it was a 150MB drive that came in the only "factory" built computer I ever bought. I replaced it with a 350MB that cost a small fortune. Every drive since then just got outgrown. And I'm still using the first SSD I ever bought that's 120GB for Windows XP. I also always leave my PC's on 24/7

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Same here on HDD and SSD - no failures for ages

I have only ever had 1 failure, a WD 4TB drive about 8 years ago (only used for backups, so not really used!), got it replaced under warranty.

Dwarfr66 said:

I have only ever had 1 failure, a WD 4TB drive about 8 years ago (only used for backups, so not really used!), got it replaced under warranty.

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I'm surprised they replaced it. Did the guy on the phone say, "okay, but just this once" ? That's what they told me after the drive failed on less than one month of use. That was nearly ten years ago, but that man did not know how right he was as I have never purchased a Western Digital hard drive since. I've had WD Blues fail on me numerous times, WD Greens, and the first and the last WD spinner I returned was a WD Black. Perhaps they upped the quality since but I'm not taking any chances.

I live in the north, in Canada. Perhaps the reason for the failures is due to all the bouncing around the packages suffer in shipping. This would not explain why any Seagates I own have significantly out lasted nearly all the WD spinners I've ever owned. This is not to say Seagate never made crappy hard drives. The old style "slim" 500GB 3.5" spinners also tended to crater on me easily, but anything 1TB or higher seems safe with Seagate.

Now to be fair, I have an array of WD Velociraptor drives that must be around 16 years old still spinning happily in my X99 build. They have never given me any trouble. So I am guessing the very old WD spinners (Enterprise class) were well built. The old Caviar Blacks used to be pretty good too, but the only way you'll get these now is if you buy used. This led to some research on my part at one point. Based on my findings this is my advice:

1) Ignore the shills. The best hard drives (mechanical) are CMR. Avoid purchasing SMR drives. Make sure of this before you buy.

2) Enterprise class drives tend to last longer. They cost more but they'll save you money in the long run.

3) If money isn't a concern but durability is go with Helium filled drives such as EXOS or the old HGST HUH drives.

Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) is notorious for short life spans. Conventional magnetic recording (CMR) will cost a bit more but is much more durable. Helium filled drives last long because there is no oxygen inside them to corrode the parts when the drives get hot. Unfortunately, Western Digital has bought out HGST so the only way you'll be getting the older style HGST drives is if you buy used. I'm currently experimenting with Iron Wolf drives and so far these are proving to be reliable hard drives. The Toshiba NAS drives I'm using are also proving to be a wise choice. What they have in common is CMR. My advice is that if you simply must buy a Western Digital spinner make sure that it is a CMR drive first.

Here is an example of some of the drives I'm currently using in my main. Other drives (external) have been switched off. I own about a dozen devices using various multiple drives and most of them multi-boot. I think I know to some degree from whence I accumulate my knowledge but experience is subjective. Factors like geographical location, climate, quality control, and bureaucracy should also be taken into account.

PCUser said:

Last night @ Walmart, I noticed a brand new laptop with 4GB of ram . . . 4GB . . . for Windows 11 . . . I didn't bother looking at what the CPU was.

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You know what that's about, right? The pre-build companies are leaving the RAM expansion to the customer and only supplying the bare butt minimum coz RAM costs too much.

Scannerman said:

You know what that's about, right? The pre-build companies are leaving the RAM expansion to the customer and only supplying the bare butt minimum coz RAM costs too much.

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AGREED, YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, 100% TRUE.

If they had more than the very bare minimum of RAM pre-installed in laptop, it would negatively affect their profit, price point, supply chain, sourcing, etc.

PCUser said:

AGREED, YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, 100% TRUE.

If they had more than the very bare minimum of RAM pre-installed in laptop, it would negatively affect their profit, price point, supply chain, sourcing, etc.

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In fact some companies are leaving it to the buyer to decide altogether. They can put in a request of their own (for a nominal fee) to have RAM installed. I'm not making it up. Even Level 1 Techs touched on the story. Check it out, pseymour

You want me to comb through all of their videos and articles to find it? I don't work for you. Besides, it's not the fact that OEMs are changing installed RAM quantities I found so asinine.

pseymour said:

You want me to comb through all of their videos and articles to find it? I don't work for you. Besides, it's not the fact that OEMs are changing installed RAM quantities I found so asinine.

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Well, likewise. I don't work for you either. I do my own research. Sometimes I'm even charitable. Still, I do appreciate your sense of humour. What I find asinine are these prices for silly con. RAM is indeed a commodity. What I find so ludicrous is that people are still buying the stuff at these prices. They're the ones feeding the flames while all the while they're complaining about the heat.

One can thank AI for this mess.