Hard drives could be about to get more expensive – and we have AI to blame

Enterprise models will get pricier, but the likelihood is that all storage prices are heading upwards

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Here’s some bad news for those looking at buying a newhard drive– prices are about to rise, by the looks of things.

And that holds true even for consumer hard drives, even though this news – which comes via a report from analyst firmTrendForce– relates to large capacity hard drives in the immediate future.

TrendForce observes that there’s a demand forhigh-capacity HDD(Hard Disk Drive) products being driven by AI, and that’s worsened by reduced production levels from manufacturers – skewing the supply and demand balance heavily towards the latter.

As ever in these cases, this leads to price rises, and a letter fromSeagate’s top brass is furnished as clear evidence of this. Indeed, the letter states that Seagate is bringing in price increases for its hard drives immediately, and that another factor in play causing this is global inflationary pressures.

Seagate observes that it expects supply constraints to continue with HDDs going forward, and prices will rise in future quarters even more due to this.

There are some other factors to consider here. Firstly, TrendForce points out a report fromTechNews(a Taiwanese site), where industry sources claim that ongoing limited supply for higher capacity hard drives could persist throughout the entire year, and that HDD prices are set to rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024.

On top of that, there’s also the recent news from Western Digital, another huge force in the world of hard drives, which made a similar announcement about the cost of hard drives going up in the near future.

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Analysis: Hard bargains soon to be thin on the ground?

It should be noted that while these price hikes are for AI-targeted hard drives – meaning models with very large capacities – demand for these will inevitably affect smaller drives, as big manufacturers look to reprioritize and capitalize on the profits to be had in the booming artificial intelligence arena.

So, we’d expect prices across the board to be ticking up for hard drives, especially considering that Western Digital talked about higher demand recently, as mentioned, and specifically indicated rises would happen across itsentire portfolioof hard drives – large and small.

For those of you thinking that AI is all about GPUs, so – what gives here? Well, it is, when it comes to processing anyway, and providing the raw grunt to answer queries – but it’s also about managing huge sets of data trawled from the wider web to train the AI. And where does that data go? It’s stored on hard drives – large ones, and tons of them. Hence the spike in storage demand here, and the knock-on effect on smaller HDD models as observed.

Compounding the misery for the PC components market is that elsewhere in the storage world,SSD pricing is also increasing, and hasbeen for a while now.

The upshot of which is that if you’re mulling an upgrade (or indeed anew PC build), whatever storage you’re looking at buying – hard drive or SSD, or maybe both – you’d be best off making a move sooner rather than later. There are stilldecent SSD dealsout there, after all – andhard drive bargainstoo, but those current price levels may not last that much longer.

ViaTom’s Hardware

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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