this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And just as hard disk prices were on the verge of getting to pre-flood trends, AI increased their prices as well. Gotta save all the stolen training data somewhere.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Hard drive prices returned to their pre-flood level a decade prior to the AI boom.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's why I wrote "trend". Prices were about to reach 10 € per TB before the flood. For new drives.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So, being specific, what are you claiming? That the rate of change in price over some time period (what time period?) was comparable and accelerating and you believed that it would continue to increase?

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 1 week ago

Basically, yes.

I bought a new drive every two years or so for about 100 to 150 Euros and it was always double the size of the last one. Moore's Law style. The next one would have been an 8 TB one. I don't think that was an unrealistic expectation.

Then the floods happened. Yeah, we've seen 4 TB drives, maybe even 6 TB drives for that price. But not 8 TB or I must have missed them. I was lucky to get some 12 TB drives for about 140 €. But they were refurbished and one is already dead.

The whole discussion is moot either way. The floods happened and besides that inflation and AI are hell bent on keeping the prices up for us mortals.

[–] calamityjanitor@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

The first website with data going that far back I found is pcindex.app. to be fair, I've never heard of it, but their data for 1TB HDDs follows what I emotionally remember; prices skyrocketed in 2011 after the floods, then stayed higher forever after. They started getting more reasonable in 2019, but the AI boom have since sent things off again.