Who needs computers anyways?
Just go outside and play with real people
Syrup of Squill.
AFAIK this has already been a problem, you can find Samsung M.2 SSDs for cheaper than Samsung SATA SSDs at the same capacity, because their cloud customers have all flown past classic SATA/SAS for NVME U.2 and U.3, which is much more similar to M.2 due to NVME.
I was planning on adding a big SSD array to my server which has a bunch of external 2.5 SAS slots, but it ended up being cheaper and faster to buy a 4 slot M.2 PCIe card and buy 4 M.2 drives instead.
Putting it on a x16 PCIe slot gives me 4 lanes per drive with bifurication, which gets me the advertised maximum possible speed on PCIe 4.
Whether or not the RAM surge will affect chip production capacity is the real issue. It seems all 3 OEMs could effectively reduce capacity for all other components after slugging billions of dollars into HBM RAM. It wouldn’t just be SSDs, anything that relies on the same supply chain could be heavily affected.
Exactly this. Micron ended their consumer RAM. Sansung here is just stopping producing something that is arguably outdated, and has a perfectly fine, already more available, most often cheaper or equivalent modern replacement.
AI has taken more things since it’s big push to be adopted in the public sector.
Clean Air
Water
Fair electricity bills
Ram
GPUs
SSDs
Jobs
Other people’s art and writing.
There are no benefit to this stuff. It is just grifting.
Also free and fair elections. Fidesz published a clearly AI-generated document claiming it was a leak from current oppposition party Tisza, as a real program.
Aside: WTF are they using SSDs for?
LLM inference in the cloud is basically only done in VRAM. Rarely stale K/V cache is cached in RAM, but new attention architectures should minimize that. Large scale training, contrary to popular belief, is a pretty rare event most data centers and businesses are incapable of.
…So what do they do with so much flash storage!? Is it literally just FOMO server buying?
Storage. There aren’t enough hard drives, so datacentres are also buying up SSDs, since it’s needed to store training data.
since it’s needed to store training data.
Again, I don’t buy this. The training data isn’t actually that big, nor is training done on such a huge scale so frequently.
As we approach the theoretical error rate limit for LLMs, as proven in the 2020 research paper by OpenAI and corrected by the 2022 paper by Deepmind, the required training and power costs rise to infinity.
In addition to that, the companies might have many different nearly identical datasets to try to achieve different outcomes.
Things like books and wikipedia pages aren’t that bad, wikipedia itself compressed is only 25GB, maybe a few hundred petabytes could store most of these items, but images and videos are also valid training data and that’s much larger, and then there is readable code. On top of that, all user inputs have to be stored to reference them again later if the chatbot offers that service.
The leak comes after another report detailed that Samsung has raised DDR5 memory prices by up to 60%.
MF… And why they wind down SSD production this time? Last time was 2 years ago, because the SSD prices were low and they wanted to raise them (which happened).
I remember when 8TB SATA SSD was $350
This seems like a non issue dramatised for headlines, they are phasing out outdated sata connection to only favour current m.2.
It’s like gpu and motherboard manufacturers announcing they are no longer including VGA ports in favour of DVI display port and HDMI. I don’t think that was a bad thing.
I’m sure some people who are lucky enough to have hardware that still requires SATA want to keep upgrading to new SATA devices but it’s been enough time. I’m ok with just m.2 now.
Tell that to my school division’s IT department, who have us all running Displayport to VGA adapters, attaching to our monitors and projectors via VGA. This is because our displays are either a) too old and only support VGA and DVI in, or b) they purchased displays with HDMI, but our ThinkPad laptops only have Displayport out.
Sometimes it is more a matter of mixing and matching tech in large cash-strapped systems that might get slapped by these issues as well.
And yes, those adapters cause as many headaches as you might think.
Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)
The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer
There are millions of devices that still and will continue to use SATA.
My Synology NAS only accepts SATA. So if one of my SSDs dies I’m just shit out of luck and have to find a 8 bay M.2 NAS to have a comparable alternative?
Your comment is beyond ridiculous
- Don’t use SSDs for a server…
- They make SATA M2 adapters
- Seriously are you putting sata SSDs in your NAS? Don’t…
There are definitely valid reasons to use SSDs in a server/array. One of my proxmox servers runs 4x m.2s in raidz1 so all my vms are super snappy. Depending on what you’re running you can really see benefits, for example:
- Elastic Stack
- Network storage for photo editing
- Lemmy
- Immich
Pretty much anything with a lot of metadata or tons of files will see benefits from running on SSDs, this comes with the caveat that cheap ssds wear quickly and are a pain in the ass but if you need it, you need it
Indeed.
It’s standard distributed systems design to have a hierarchy of storage with different speeds whose contents is allocated based on the frequency with which certain data is accessed, and HDDs are really only good for bulk data which is seldom accessed (basically the speed category for long term storage with low wait times when it does get needed but not really meant to be constantly accessed, which is just above things like tapes and other backup storage methods).
So for example for a dynamic website with thousands of users most current data should be in SSDs and HDDs would maybe contain low access info such as historical data from the last couple of years and in front of those SSDs there would be a ton of memory to serve as a cache for the most accessed of all data (say, the CSS, JS and images of the home page) as in-memory data is even faster to access than data in an SSD.
The idea that SSDs aren’t useful for servers is hilarious ignorant.
Ok. But then you are not a regular person running a regular home server but an enthusiast with small scale commercial needs.
I think anyone running a home server qualifies as an enthusiast, there are more uses for home servers than just plex lol
The ai crash is going to slap the tech industry hard
Not just the tech industry. A huge proportion of the US economy is made up of betting on AI. Like the crash of 2008 (but worse, some predict) it will hurt everyone but the richest, who will become even richer.
There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as “AI” than on the Internet-related tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones.
The risk is that when one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classes, in turn creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes, which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses and that will pull even more money out from other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.
All this to say that I expect this one when it blows up will be bigger than 2008 and 2000, possibly bigger than both of those combined.
Is there anything a normal person can do to insulate against it to any degree?
Assets are more valuable than money is now, consider what can maintain fundamental value regardless of the economy
Food, weapons and armour?
This bubble is going to become the entire market, isn’t it. Until it becomes too big to fail because 80% of the workforce is tied up in it. Then it is allowed to pop, costing the western world everything, all going into the pockets of the super rich, and we get to start over.
Then it is allowed to pop, costing the western world everything, all going into the pockets of the super rich, and we get to start over.
After the bailouts at the expense of the poor, of course.
That’s the entire point. It’s a scam.
Calm down, everyone. Who cares about SATA SSDs? SATA is nearly a decade out of date! Even budget motherboards support NVME these days. It’s time to move on and quit fear-mongering. This is a non-story.
You must be fun at parties, eh?
Yes, actually, cause I’m usually the one bringing the cocaine or the molly.
Why would ending sata ssd production create price pressure for m2 ssds? If anything, they should be able to produce more of those.
M.2 is just a connector, you can run SATA over M.2. But you’re right, freeing up 2.5" production for M.2 should reduce price pressure.
Yet another chapter in the fucking AI craze started up by them fucking techbros.
Also, someone forgot that in some places in the world, people have to use older PCs with SATA drives. That, until their discontinuation announcements, Crucial and Samsung SATA drives were several tiers better than, say, those cheapo Ramsta drives.
Discontinuing outdated tech has nothing to do with AI. SATA SSDs need to be retired. NVME is superior and widely available.
My mind forgot that M.2 is probably more prevalent these days and that they’re not just shutting down for no reason.
Is it though? Pretty much every single current-gen mainboard still comes with a number of SATA ports.
Most people have one drive. Everything else is cloud based now. It’s horrible 😭
Everyone is going to buy M.2 SSDs first, and only buy SATA if they don’t have enough M.2 slots. I really doubt SATA SSDs are selling well.
With that said, I don’t see SATA going anywhere. It’s (comparatively low) bandwidth means you can throw a few ports on your board and not sacrifice much. For some quick math: a M.2 port back-hauled by PCIe 4.0 x4 has 7.8 GB/s of data lines going to it. While SATA 6.0 has only 0.75 GB/s of data lines going to it.
I have one m.2 and multiple sata ssd, since on my motherboard occupying the second m.2 slot would drop the pcie lane for my GPU due to sharing bandwidth.
Do newer boards not have that problem?
Higher spec boards dont have this issue; Typically an issue with low and mid range boards due to cost savings.
Which just also shows why this is a very anti consumer move. Its trying to artifically push people to by new hardware because there hasn’t been significant enough changes to really warrant it. This then means more people who might have swapped off of windows to keep their existing hardware might end up having to upgrade then stick with their familiar windows platform so that the ai bubble can continue. Its completely fucked up
