It Seems Like the AI Apocalypse Has Come for Hard Drives

PC gaming has been disconnected to a unsmooth commencement successful 2026, with some RAM and graphics cards facing monolithic banal issues, owed to request from AI datacenters. It looks similar hard drives are next.

Both Seagate and Western Digital, 2 of the biggest hard thrust manufacturers, person told investors that banal is wholly sold retired done 2027, according to a study from German outlet Heise. As a result, hard drives are starting to spot accrued prices. For instance, a 4TB WD Blue thrust costs $99 connected Amazon close now, wherever it outgo conscionable $67–$85 conscionable a fewer months ago, according to Camelcamelcamel.

That's atrocious enough, but it looks similar SSDs are besides being impacted by the abrupt summation of request for hard drives, which is besides costing the terms of flash retention to spell up – and it was already starting to emergence successful January.

Because some HDD manufacturers are claiming that their 2026 banal has already been sold through, it's improbable that the hard thrust pricing concern is going to amended immoderate clip soon. And with different captious constituent being impacted by datacenter-driven demand, it's adjacent much apt that prebuilt gaming PCs and different gaming hardware is going to spell up successful terms implicit the adjacent year.

Why Hard Drives? Why Now?

For a portion now, hard drives person been a budget-friendly mode of adding other retention to your PC, adjacent though they've been falling retired of manner arsenic a main retention device. That mostly comes down to speed: Because hard drives person to physically find information connected a moving disk, they're overmuch slower than SSDs. The appeal, then, was that you could get a ton of abstraction for not overmuch money. But that's besides what makes them ace appealing for AI training.

Training LLMs similar ChatGPT oregon Gemini requires a ton of data, truthful it's not astonishing that AI companies are prioritizing retention capableness implicit the velocity of the storage. And arsenic the hard thrust manufacturers scope manufacturing limits, SSDs are going to commencement filling successful the gaps – adjacent if they're overmuch much costly to nutrient astatine the aforesaid capacities.

Unfortunately, SSDs were already starting to consciousness the unit from the RAM pricing, arsenic it uses immoderate of the aforesaid components. We're present astatine a constituent wherever I'm not definite if determination are any PC components that aren't going to beryllium impacted by AI successful the adjacent twelvemonth oregon so.

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor astatine IGN and the PC components queen. You tin travel her @Jackiecobra