Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117412472741486889
RAM and SSD prices have shot straight through the ceiling and meanwhile the OSs they come with are bloated with memory-and-storage guzzling AI garbage nobody asked for—not to mention that for actual productivity or gaming purposes, today's PCs are barely ahead of ones from 2020.
Who'd want a new PC right now?
@cstross @arstechnica It’s funny: RAM and SSD prices have shot up due to advance purchases for equipment to fill AI datacenters.
But AI datacenters mostly aren’t being built. The forecast pipeline still looks massive, but most of the actual construction is delayed, cancelled, abandoned, walked-back. Whether it’s Microsoft, coreweave, Meta, Oracle — projects cancelled all over the place.
If the datacenters aren’t being built, the machines containing all the RAM and SSD aren’t being deployed.
So where did all the RAM and SSD go? Why have the prices skyrocketed? Why is there a shortage?
I figure we’ll find out when the bubble pops, and documents will come out showing collusion between GPU manufacturers and the storage industry or whatever. It doesn’t feel like a natural price movement at the moment, but there’s no confirmed alternative explanation for it?
@NewtonMark @arstechnica The RAM and FLASH is still coming off the fabs—I've heard rumours that there's going to be a huge glut of DDR5 originally optioned for data centres hitting the wholesale market in a few months.
(I'm sitting on my hands, saving for a couple of 8Tb sticks of M.2 FLASH when prices fall back to where they should have been all along.)
@cstross @NewtonMark @arstechnica If there is, I'm going to buy a ton of it just in case.
@lispi314 @NewtonMark @arstechnica @cstross If you don’t need specifically the tiny M.2 form, there are some HHHL PCIe cards like Intel’s p4608 or p4618 which may fit the bill.
@bob_zim @lispi314 @NewtonMark @arstechnica I don't use PCs so PCIe card form factor is useless to me.
@cstross @lispi314 @NewtonMark @arstechnica MacBooks have never had M.2 slots, so you’re looking at an outboard adapter either way. If you don’t need the portability, a PCIe card adapter and a desktop PCIe card SSD may be workable at a much lower cost than a high-capacity M.2 drive.
@bob_zim @lispi314 @NewtonMark @arstechnica Thunderbolt adapter. Bus-powered so portable along with the laptop and much more compact than a PCIe cage.
But I want the big M.2s to provision a new-to NAS, for household backup and storage. Not for a laptop or desktop.
@lispi314 @bob_zim @NewtonMark @arstechnica And I should need this for my Macbook upon which I write novels why, exactly? /s
@cstross @arstechnica nailed it; the whole industry has massively shot itself in the foot.
Meanwhile, those of us who are still trying to get on with “normal” IT are struggling replace kit that is genuinely outdated and knackered.
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@cstross
I bought a beast gaming PC mid-2020 — nothing too bespoke just solid but not top-line specs for the time, increased its RAM and Video card mid 2024 just before the Big Price Spike.
It doesn’t have stoopid s*** like water-cooling or overclocking, just a solid build from scratch.
It’s a windows box and I reluctantly/was forced to go to W11 eventually, but I’ve turned off as much of the W11 stoopid s*** as I could find settings for.
It still runs all the latest games at High/Ultra settings flawlessly.
I don’t know any other era in home computing where a six year old rig would still be performing this well for the money.