One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.
I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.
[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.
ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.
I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…
Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.
It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.
Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?
It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.
Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now).
Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.
1. Factories take time to build.
2. Building factories requires capital to be invested now.
3. The return-on-capital will only be obtained in the next n years.
4. But if demand goes down, we'll have much more supply than demand, leading to a cutthroat price competition, which could prevent the factory costs from ever being recouped.
I think one flaw in my thinking could be that there might be a lack of experience within the people for something like this, do you consider it to be a factor and would it be difficult to hire people relevant to such fab?
TSMC Arizona projected investment is $165 billion. Not millions. And yes apparently hiring the right staff has been one of the issues.
People really underestimate the work of Maurice Chang.
We are trully doomed.