Manufacturers unprepared: server hard drives sold out for a year
Server operators who want to order HDDs have to wait a year. SSDs are coming into focus as an alternative for cold storage.
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Supply bottlenecks are apparently looming for HDDs and SSDs for servers. According to reports from Asia, cost-optimized hard drives of the so-called nearline class are already acutely affected: Trendforce, a market observer specializing in storage, cites delivery times of one year if a company wants to order larger quantities now.
The demand is said to be due to the many new data centres that hyperscalers are building as a result of the AI hype. In particular, inference servers running fully trained AI models for practical use are currently driving up demand.
Trendforce also shares a message from Western Digital (WD) to its partners, according to which WD intends to raise the prices of all hard disks immediately. The manufacturer also wants to ship more hard disks by sea freight instead of by air, which will exacerbate the current bottlenecks: Although this saves WD money, shipping from Asia to Europe and the USA takes up to ten weeks.
HDD manufacturers are said not to have prepared for the increasing demand from AI servers. Accordingly, they have not significantly increased their production capacity in recent years.
QLC SSDs as an alternative
Due to the long delivery times, server operators are apparently increasingly considering SSDs for cold storage, i.e. for storing large amounts of data without frequent access. SSDs could be an alternative, despite the higher costs and the speed not required.
According to Digitimes, Sandisk has already increased the prices for NAND flash components by ten percent in the short term. Micron is said to have suspended its own price information for a week in order to set new prices. According to expectations, they could rise by up to 30 percent. Other manufacturers are likely to follow suit soon.
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End customers still spared
Fortunately for end customers, the price increases will initially only affect high-capacity QLC components that write four bits per cell (quadruple level cells). In contrast, chips with triple level cells (TLC, three bits per cell) are most frequently used in end customer models.
The situation could become unpleasant for consumers if manufacturers increasingly switch their production to server models. Fewer HDDs and SSDs would then go into retail and instead into servers, which would result in potential price increases.
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