Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Data Storage

Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026 (wccftech.com) 97

Posted by msmash from the try-next-year dept.
Western Digital's entire hard drive manufacturing capacity for calendar year 2026 is now fully spoken for, CEO Irving Tan disclosed during the company's second-quarter earnings call, a stark sign of how aggressively hyperscalers are locking down storage supply to feed their AI infrastructure buildouts.

The company has firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and has signed long-term agreements stretching into 2027 and 2028 that cover both exabyte volumes and pricing. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89% of Western Digital's total, according to the company's VP of Investor Relations, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026 More

Western Digital is Sold Out of Hard Drives for 2026

Comments Filter:

  • *scratches Western Digital from buy list for the future*

    • Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:40PM (#65993072)
      They've done it for you.

    • Re:Okay (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2026 @08:32PM (#65993272)
      Companies are pre-ordering drives for servers that haven't been manufactured yet, for data centers that haven't been built yet, for demand that doesn't exist yet. But don't worry, things won't go to shit. Companies won't suddenly find themselves with a massive inventory of drives that they don't need. None of that will happen, right? Right?

      Looking froward to cheap hard drives in 2027.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by leonbev ( 111395 )

        On the flip side, when the great AI boom goes bust 18 months from now, you'll probably be able to pick up some surplus Enterprise grade 20 TB hard drives in the bankruptcy auctions for around $50 each.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          harddrives have a finite service life and those used in cloud providers are recycled not resold or reused. The big buyers are AWS, Google and Azure, if you expect any of them to go bankrupt anytime in the next decade I have a bridge to sell you.

          • harddrives have a finite service life

            Correct.
            For typical enterprise-grade drive, warranty are in the 5 to 10 years range.
            So you can expect them to last that many years at minimum.

            So if the bubble pops in 18months as was suggested in the post above, those drives will even still be under warranty, and definitely have quite some life left in them.

            and those used in cloud providers are recycled not resold or reused.

            ...by an normally operating company, where there's somebody who will be held accountable for whatever happens with these drives: yes.
            (They'll most likely destroy the drives to avoid any hassle regarding

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by leonbev ( 111395 )

            I thought that the biggest buyer of this storage was Open AI, and they currently don't have the power they need to run all of the data centers they're building.

            My hunch is that many of these drives will still be new in the boxes and never used by the time they go bust.

      • The reality is hard drives die, for cloud providers they die or are aged out in the hundreds of thousands every year. Even if no new demand for storage exists (highly unlikely) the drives will still be used.

      • Well, the AI bubble seems to have resurrected - however temporarily - the hard drive industry, that threatened to be eclipsed by SSDs

  • Just wait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:19PM (#65993006)
    November is bankruptcy month. Hard drives at 90% off.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by burtosis ( 1124179 )

      November is bankruptcy month. Hard drives at 90% off.

      Oh thank god. Maybe I won’t have to take out a second mortgage to pay for 32gb of rdimm.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        The workstation I'm typing this on has 128GB of RAM. It's probably worth more than my car now.

        • my 64GB RAM kit purchased for just over $200 last year is just over $1000 now.
          • What I cannot convince the local luddites is that we are on the same tune as 90 years ago. Tremendous investment in machine tools did wonders for the US economy 1942-1992, the further replacements revolutionized manufacturing across the western world. Last I knew RAM was not a consumable resource if not ran out of spec. It 95% likely those sticks will work next year. The hyperscalars knowing RAM is now expensive will make a point of harvesting ram of the technologies that roll off from 5 years ago and

            • Re:Just wait (Score:4, Interesting)

              by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @06:43AM (#65993778)

              90 years ago the industrial revolution helped improve the economy for most Americans (it didn't help those the laws were written to keep down - i.e., colored).

              AI is poised to only help the richest of the rich - always see how it's positioned to "you don't need so many employees" or "you don't need xxx" - where that could be writers, artists, whatever.

              And the hyperscalers know the real problem is how perishable the technology is - you buy that nVidia AI processor today, in 3 years it's worthless. That's why they're gobbling up all the RAM now rather than waiting because the hardware value is diminishing quickly, and if you can't get your model out today it's too late.

              That's why AI is gobbling up everything in its wake. It's a rush

          • The 64GB DDR4 I paid $101 for is now $360 used. Even the old RAM is expensive! Good thing I bought Crucial so it probably won't fail on me, fingers crossed.

            • The 64GB DDR4 I paid $101 for is now $360 used. Even the old RAM is expensive! Good thing I bought Crucial so it probably won't fail on me, fingers crossed.

              Well, while buying Crucial probably seemed like a good bet I wouldn’t count on it. The company is going to have severe financial problems when the AI crash comes. I’d find another buyer and sell your majority stake quickly before the market valuation nosedives.

    • Nawh, they'll be at a 350% markup. 14 TB DC530 drives I bought 5 years ago for $110 ea used are $330 used today.
      • I'm in the same boat with the same drives. I wish I had bought a couple more about a year ago. The only good thing this shortage has been good for is making it worthwhile to sell a bunch of old "too small to be useful' drives on eBay.

      • My god! $330 for 5+ year-old hard drives?

      • > Nawh, they'll be at a 350% markup.

        No they won't.
        Great debating with you.

  • I saw it coming (Score:4, Informative)

    by SumDog ( 466607 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:24PM (#65993024) Homepage Journal
    My current drives were getting near capacity. I was looking at the 30TB that finally came onto the consumer market. I saw prices start to rise in December and got worries, so I pulled the trigger. Seagate had 30TB on their website for reasonable (summer) prices. I bought 4x 30TB (78TB usable in zfs with RAIDZ) for just under $2500 with shipping/taxes. By January, the drives had jumped to $900 a piece!

    Older drives will now be JBOD/zfs backup drives. I have one old Ryzen 3 with a 16GB stick that supports wake on lan that I can turn into my backup server (have it power up, snap-shot and sleep every night). I'm kinda glad I overspent on hardware in early December. I'm inventorying all my spare homelab stuff and hope I have enough spares to weather any purchases for the rest of 2026.

    • Re:I saw it coming (Score:4, Informative)

      by slaker ( 53818 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:57PM (#65993120)

      I get most of my drives by being the only local customer for my server colo. I'm the only person who comes and goes with any regularity, and I've gotten to know the on-site ops well enough that they give me a chance to buy anything juicy from the abandoned/nonpayment hardware as they pull it out and evaluate it. I have gotten CRAZY stuff that way and I highly recommend it.

      That being said, I haven't seen any deals for larger than 20TB drives either, but I would like to point out that both Seagate and WD high capacity external drives are generally going to be SATA versions of the same enterprise drives they normally sell. Sometimes, they don't even bother to rebadge them. I don't have any as large as 30TB but they last bunch of 28TB Seagates were a mix of re-badged (often with another sticker underneath) Barracuda and Exos drives. I got them on sale from Best Buy for I think $330 each. Are they as good as the Ironwolf whatever ones that cost twice as much and come with five years of data recovery? Probably not. Since I just wanted those particular drives for my off-site Plex server, I think I'm OK with that. Neither Seagate nor WD are selling extremely high capacity SMR drives, so everything you get works great with ZFS and you can shuck them out of the external enclosures and stick them on your SATA or SAS controller as you see fit.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The 28TB Seagate drives had reliability issues for commercial customers. I can't remember the exact details, but Seagate basically withdrew them from that market and rebadged them for consumer use. I've got one myself.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        Lucked out doing a refresh of my home PCs last October.

        WHEW!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      RAIDZ with 30TB drives... you, sir, are a much more courageous man than I.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      So did you resell them, or are you waiting to sell them for your retirement?

  • possible unlikely silver lining for PC tech (Score:5, Interesting)

    by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:25PM (#65993026)

    Can this be used to make ECC the default, no more non-error correcting for the consumer market by economy of scale price reduction?
    What other enterprise level tech could also become the part of the consumer standard?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slaker ( 53818 )

      Technically, all DDR5 has data protection for single-bit errors on-chip. It's not the same thing as big-boy registered DIMMs, but I don't think you're going to get the whole world of people who buy Acer whatevers from Walmart to go along with yet ANOTHER reason to make RAM more expensive.

      Aside from that, there isn't currently much justification for looking at Intel on consumer platforms. Having integrated Xe cores is nifty for video editors, but just like gamers, they're probably going to spend cash on an n

    • Exactly. Non-ECC memory is a massive security vulnerability, not to mention a source of silent corruption. There should only be Chipkill-level ECC and integrity on all network and data buses.
      • Non-ECC is NOT a massive security vulnerability at all. If you have stuff with unfettered write access to your memory you are fucked with or without ECC. It is a potential source of corruption, but for home users this is a very very insignificant issue that is for the most part not worth paying more for in order to protect from 1 in a trillion occurrence where it is significant as a thousand other compromises in consumer gear are far more significant.

    • What does WD having sold the next three years of production have to do with getting PC buyers to adopt/embrace ECC?

      At a minimum ECC makes memory 12.5% more expensive (the cost of the 9th bit), and with RAM prices going thru the roof, I doubt folks will be lining up to pay 12.5% more for the same usable RAM capacity in their desktop.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by haruchai ( 17472 )

        Not specifically about WD but about what manufacturers may have to do to win back the consumer or enthusiast.
        The massive splurge on all things AI means that everything consumer level will be ignored for at least a couple years, perhaps longer but eventually the bubble will burst.
        Until then the focus and the production will be geared almost entirely towards enterprise features and a lot of money will be spent on the required tooling, etc.
        This makes sense to those companies because of the revenue.
        But when the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unrtst ( 777550 )

      Can this be used to make ECC the default, no more non-error correcting for the consumer market by economy of scale price reduction?
      What other enterprise level tech could also become the part of the consumer standard?

      I love how all the replies to any posts promoting more widespread use of ECC memory just shit on it. We've had a proven solution (ECC) for ages, but they beg for the slightly cheaper product that will introduce a bit error at some point. One of them notes that errors are 1 in a trillion (1,000,000,000,000); Meanwhile, 128gb of RAM has over a trillion bits (1,099,511,627,776). Imagine if the Pentium FDIV bug from 1994 was simply accepted for all consumer PC's cause they could save a couple bucks!

    • Can this be used to make ECC the default, no more non-error correcting for the consumer market by economy of scale price reduction?
      What other enterprise level tech could also become the part of the consumer standard?

      FWIW all DDR5 and beyond is ECC. In consumer "unregistered" versions ECC is managed entirely within the memory module. In server "registered" versions error correction is handled by the CPU memory controller. Benefit of server version is protection against errors occurring on the bus and features like pool scrubbing and mirroring.

  • Wanted to buy a computer (Score:4, Funny)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @06:26PM (#65993032)

    I saw all of the hype around AI. I really wanted to try AI, so I ordered a computer. Looks like I can get online and try AI in 2029.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      If you only want to use cloud based AI, you can use whatever it is you used to post your comment to access them.

      • Man, I can't wait to get in on the hallucination.

        • It's hit and miss with the hallucinations. I use Meta's AI (Llama 4), and it gives me some answers that are just, "WTF?," and I call it out and it improves. Some other answers are truly surprising in their usefulness. For giggles, I asked for a hypothetical, "How would I do $this," and it gave me an answer that I hadn't been able to find elsewhere, and was, "Holy shit! Nice!" And sometimes, it just echoes what I asked. So it's like a box of chocolates: you never know what you'll get. But it certainly
    • I want the 6502-based local LLM that fits in 128 KiB. That should be enough for anyone.

    • The whole point is so you get hooked on AI and they get to charge you for it with another subscription, infact you can do that today

    • ?

      Because WD is the only mfg of HDD, you can't use an SSD, and you won't buy a computer from one of the seven customers that have locked up WD's production of HDDs?

      You do know there are alternatives for HDDs, right?

  • When the AI bubble finally bursts ... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @07:33PM (#65993184)
    They should at least sell said inventory of reusable components instead of woodchippering them like pretty corporations destroying food so people can't freegan.

  • I'll wait until the storm breaks and get the hardware for half price

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Until hardware breaks in 2026. :(

    • Half off is expensive after a technology sector bust, my example is post 2000 and 2008 , expect 5 cents on the dollar on everything from Core Switches to $400 desk chairs. Getting the most supportable 2 or 4 U servers filled with DDR5 and rugged laptops are already on my doomsday shopping list. A 16 to 32 core server with 256G of ram is useful at almost any speed at the right price, lets face it the world is tied together with code that does not need ultimate performance. Unfortunately that used serve

  • Who knew spinning drives will still be a thing for the next couple years?

    • They're slower but more reliable than SSDs. For that reason alone, I expect they'll be with us for a while yet.

      • I've had many experiences with older SSDs getting slow due to weak cells, despite being powered on continuously. A full surface rewrite fixes the problem, though it gives me NO confidence that SSDs can be expected to hold data if they go in storage for a few years.

        Before rewrite [ninechime.com] and after rewrite [ninechime.com]

        Meanwhile, all the hard drives in my 90's retro computers still work perfectly fine, as do the floppy disks I've tested lately. It's really quite remarkable how stable magnetic media is.

        • Meanwhile, all the hard drives in my 90's retro computers still work perfectly fine, as do the floppy disks I've tested lately. It's really quite remarkable how stable magnetic media is.

          Indeed! My experience is that most of the "bad" magnetic disks die within the first year or two. If they make it past that, they've got a good future. We have a mid 90s Quadra Powerpc Mac at work that we boot up a time or two every year to read an old disk, load an old version of a file, etc. That thing just keeps on chugging.

          I have my first SSD in a drawer. It's an OCZ Vertex 2, IIRC 100gb. From circa 2010. I should see if it still works...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

            My Quadra 650 (1993) still boots from a 250MB HD. I really should get one of those adapters that mounts SD cards as HDs.

            I only ever use it for my tabloid SCSI scanner.
            (Missed out on grabbing a USB/SCSI adapter 20 years ago)

    • Re:Who knew... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@nospaM.yahoo.com> on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:04AM (#65993582)

      Who knew spinning drives will still be a thing for the next couple years?

      Approximately 100% of people with more than 2TB of data and anything that vaguely resembles a budget.

      Even around this time last year, 4TB spinning drives were under $100, while 4TB SSDs were *at least* $300 each, typically $400 or more. 8TB drives weren't hard to find for under $200 (and flirted with $100 on some sales), but 8TB SSDs were between $700 and $900. A 20TB RAID of mechanical drives could be had for around $1,000; 20TB of SSD storage would cost around five times that.

      Meanwhile, OEMs seem to be falling out of love with the SATA form factor, and while PCIe/NVMe is great for throughput for one or two drives, getting eight PCIe drives in an array gets messy pretty quickly. PCIe switches are still niche, expensive, have inconsistent support across OSes, and require awkward cooling solutions. Even if the drives are free, a system capable of presenting 20TB of SSD storage to an OS gets expensive quickly.

      More to the point, bulk storage *usually* doesn't have to be *that* fast. Larger storage arrays are most commonly used for backup retention, archiving, DVR storage, "Linux Distros", photographer/videographer repos, and similar loads, for which "I need to put it somewhere" is just fine at the 113Mbytes/sec limit of gigabit ethernet, potentially accelerated by one or two 500GB SSDs as intermediate caches.

      So yeah, while HDDs aren't really good as boot volumes anymore, and they're not a default in laptops or desktops anymore, there are plenty of areas where "massive and fast-enough" wins out over raw I/O.

      • Define "expensive". I have got such a 20 TB flash box, built years ago. Mobo is an asus Prime x570. I'm using an Asus hyperx 16 card. Only 3 of the 4 nvme slots in one the card work, plus 2 on the mobo. No custom cooling - just a large HAF case. Only one fan, on the NH-D15s cooler. Fan never comes on.

        The SSDs are teamgroup MP34 4 TB and were about $200 each. I use an X550-T2 for networking.

        • Define "expensive". I have got such a 20 TB flash box, built years ago.

          Sounds awesome! Seriously, I'm glad you got something that suits your needs well.

          Mobo is an asus Prime x570. I'm using an Asus hyperx 16 card. Only 3 of the 4 nvme slots in one the card work, plus 2 on the mobo.

          I'll admit that there was an incorrect assumption on my part; I was referring to "20 usable TB" that implied a RAID5/RAID6 layout, but as written, yes, 5x4TB drives fit the bill.

          That said, the thing about the HyperX cards is that they require PCIe bifurcation support on the motherboard; many don't support that. Those that do, frequently only support it on a particular slot, which then can't be used for other things. The HyperX

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by madbrain ( 11432 )

            Actually, the 5 drives are striped RAID-0, using a Windows NTFS dynamic disk. The 20TB are fully usable.

            The MP34 4TB are TLC. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08Z7LN8NM . No longer available. My purchase history shows $240 each in April 2023. It dropped to $200 later on that year. It looks like there are some on Ebay for $350 now.

            I just ran Crystaldiskmark 9.0.2, with 64GB file size, and it showed 3506 MB/s read / 4359 MB/s write, sequential. Not sure if I exceeded the buffer. It's a bit odd that the write speed

      • Can confirm, I have three 8TB HDDs which were all $150 or less. I would have liked to have used SSD instead, but that was used car money. And in fact I bought a used car around that time.

  • What? Oh. Hard drives.

    Whatever. Close enough.

    • Flash storage is way, way up as well.

      HDDs are an obvious need to go with LLMs, for storing training data. It's not practical to store the entire corpus on SSD.

  • Then they came for the RAM.
    Then they came for the flash memory.
    Now they've come for the hard drives.

    I'm sort of glad my computers are mostly antiques.

  • Yet another bubble sign: white-hot demand for a thing.

    Remember the white-hot market for homes demand in 2008? And then 2020? I sure do. What came after that? Anybody remember?

    Any time demand for something is *this* white hot, what goes up *must* come down.

    I'm not an AI skeptic, but pendulums always swing.

    • The interesting thing to me (and I'm also not an AI skeptic) is that global computing capacity, concentrated in the US and China, and in terms of compute, memory, and storage, has to be just be massively increasing right now. Whether or not AI training runs continue to take up most of the usage or not, just the existence of this much capacity could have some very interesting applications. Climate and chemical simulations at a scale never seen before? etc

      Things are out of whack now, they'll find a new equili

      • Here's why I don't think it's a ratchet. Right now, there are a million startups trying to do some random thing with AI, *any* random thing they think they can sell. All those startups, with varying levels of funding, are competing for data center capacity right now. As with any gold rush, about 90% of those startups will fail, leading to a whole lot of unused infrastructure, for which these startups paid sky-high prices. Yes, I do agree with you that AI will lead to an overall higher level of data center c

        • I absolutely agree with you. The only questions to me are when do the startups start going belly up and for how long will demand continue to outpace supply? It could be years...

          I've invested in energy, Nvidia, AMD, and a few other chip-related stocks. No software!

          • I would suggest that these extreme shortages, are a harbinger of the fall to come. The high prices and long lag times will be some of the triggers that cause many of these startups to fail. No one can predict with precision, of course, but my guess is that the end of the froth is nearly here.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

          NOS Data Centers on the horizon soon?

          • The big ones will just swoop in and buy the data centers that the little guys built for a few pennies.
            Eventually, because they can't build infrastructure every single place they want, they'll just start stacking data centers.

  • Another one for the shit list (Score:3)

    by anoncoward69 ( 6496862 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @01:02AM (#65993580)
    Crucial is on it and now Western Digital. Whenever the AI bubble pops and it will. And Crucial and WD come clawing back at the consumer market I can't wait to turn my gaze over to their competitors and make purchases with them instead.

    • Whenever the AI bubble pops and it will.

      That is the thing... the AI bubble will not pop as it is not actually a bubble. Your government wants LLMs/AI to go through all of the surveillance it has collected on you. All of the "bubble" stuff that you are seeing, is a desperate attempt at making consumers and businesses pay for it without an additional obvious tax. The bill for this is eye-watering, even for people used to dealing in billions. Your government wants absolute control over each individual's life. It is the only way to ensure 'order'.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Live or die, I'll make a million." -- Reebus Kneebus, before his jump to the center of the earth, Firesign Theater

Close