The good-old "spinning rust"—commonly referred to as Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)—may be another leg in the depleted computing infrastructure caused by the AI boom. According to DigiTimes, contract negotiations for the fourth quarter of 2025 concluded with traditional HDD prices settling about 4% higher quarter-over-quarter, marking the largest rise in the past eight quarters. That is over the largest increase in recent years, indicating that the demand is again outpacing supply even in the slower storage segments like HDD. The massive demand reportedly comes from particularly strong uptake for desktop 3.5-inch drives in China and continued heavy procurement of high-capacity units by major U.S. cloud service providers and hyperscalers.

In China, there is a preference for domestically produced CPUs and operating systems, combined with an increase in local PC assembly, which has brought HDDs back into first-class role in certain PC configurations after years of being replaced by SSDs. Additionally, concerns about SSD data retention have led some customers and policymakers to favor HDDs for specific workloads. Large cloud operators are also expanding their exabyte-class storage for AI, analytics, and archival needs. Manufacturers report that utilization rates are at or near full capacity as demand extends beyond traditional surveillance and backup applications. Especially with AI infrastructure, storing massive data for model training has prompted AI labs to use some HDD-based storage infrastructure where speed isn't needed.

On the pricing front, typical retail indicators confirm this trend. A 3.5-inch, 1 TB desktop and surveillance HDDs are trading up about 4% QoQ to roughly US$53, and 2.5-inch, 1 TB notebook drives are up about 3% to near US$50 per unit. These product classes have seen price increases for three straight quarters, with the most recent quarter the steepest since Q4 2023. Some analysts expect HDD shortages to become more apparent by 2026, and suppliers may prioritize larger, higher-margin data-center customers, which could extend further price pressure into the consumer area. After NAND flash shortage powering SSDs, HDDs are now in high demand and may remain like that for more quarter to come. Companies like Seagate are already investing a ton of resources into HAMR HDDs with the capacity of roughly 55 TB for enterprise.

https://www.techpowerup.com/344108/hdd-pric...ortage#comments

syukur suda secure 4 x 2b, 2 x 4tb NAS

I never see HDD price drop since the Thai flood from years ago.

I bought used enterprise grade SSDs for dirt cheap a few months back. Total bought 4TB x 4 pieces and hooked up as RAID 0 for mobile storage.

Google cloud jer..

Get free AI pro

Wolf Warriors: "China will increase supply of SSDs and stabilize prices."

Reality: China increase demand for HDDs.

This post has been edited by JohnL77: Dec 16 2025, 02:13 PM

Between now and 2028, all PC vendors departments will be very quiet places.

This post has been edited by vhs: Dec 16 2025, 02:11 PM

You no takut hdd fail and lost your data?

4th, Cloud: gotta introduce new pricing soon.

Nah. The data will sync back to my NAS when on home network.

luckily a few years ago I bought a couple of 16TB HDDs for 500rm each... from a crypto miner.... all still fine...

Don't care!
Janji China buat price war!
Kasi USA greedy companies bankrupt!

next, after all consumer side out of hardware and become just a dumb console streaming everything from cloud

subscription up 1000%

you will own nothing

of course. data centre don't use ram, ssd only.
they will take your power and water too.

Very complicated system

Arrr.......
CCP land
2TB SSD at the price of dirt cheap RM20
Once receive.....

Well, free market economy. Nothing wrong.

I basically needed something with large capacity and can withdraw bumps and impacts on the move. SSDs are the only way.

Of course, I ain't gonna pay full retail price for those. Used ones just nice as long the MTBF and TBW are low enough.

Time to install OS on LTO

Used hdd resale vaue naik ?

How much can I sell these NVME disks?

1. Kingston KC2500 500GB

2. XPG SX8200 Pro 512GB

3. Kingston NV1 500 GB

4. Kingston NV2 500 GB

This post has been edited by piscesguy: Dec 16 2025, 03:14 PM

soon GPU going to UUU again too

Capitalism at its best, driven by greed by corportations.

Why not subscribe to Gemini Ai Pro, can get 2TB free cloud storage too.

Seagate Ironwolf Nas 3.5 HDD
8TB
RM850, good deal?

bought 2 for my upcoming NAS set up

It's just 4% rise.
In comparison to RAM, those are real rookie numbers.

Tipulah. Wolf Warriors said CCP SSDs more reliable than SK Hynix.

You're missing my point, if China can magically increase SSD output, why are they pivoting to HDDs? I'm not saying they can't do it, but I think it will take some time.

AI bubble going to burst, many pretenders would collapse, many datacenters would be abandoned or tookover, the last few standing would reap all the fruits. It is getting exciting.

AI Chip Shortage Seen Pushing Smartphone Prices Higher in 2026

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-chip-shor...-181823863.html

modern dram and nand memory fabs are way more expensive to build and operate than legacy hdd spinning platter factories. Japan and Germany couldnt sustain the capital cost while sustaining a price war, hence why today only three big manufacturers left to corner the market.

the other thing is that for years HDD demand going down with shift to SSD, likely a lot of underutilized capacity at those Hdd factories. too bad malaysian ones all closed down edi due to chyna.

Nvidia reportedly plans 30-40% cut in GeForce GPU production in early 2026

Recent reports have claimed that Nvidia intends to reduce its production capacity for GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs in the first half of 2026. These cuts are reportedly due to shortages of memory, not just GDDR7, but all memory types.
https://overclock3d.net/news/gpu-displays/n...-in-early-2026/