How are people coping with the storage crunch

We’re going to have "fun" with this for a long time to come. Things couldn't be going better for these corporations. They’re snapping up RAM, SSDs, and HDDs for their massive projects for years to come, thereby restricting access to self-hosting and driving people in droves to their paid cloud services—which is far more profitable than selling mundane operating systems that can be bypassed anyway. Some have even stopped serving the retail market (Crucial, for example—and I wouldn't be surprised if nVIDIA followed suit) or plan to do so. They supply major clients directly, so they don't have to deal with the hassle of end consumers. Why would they still need CPUs, RAM, and disk storage for personal use when all of that can be provided much more cheaply from their data centers 24/7?

The worst-case scenario? They keep all the data and huge computing power in-house for their AI centers, while we eventually just get to "dock" remotely—fully controlled—into their META world via a „dumb“ terminal for administration, ordering, fun, and entertainment . As a h/w buyer, the end consumer is completely uninteresting... yet a wide range of groups—from politicians, government agencies, insurers, and banks to the consumer industry—are keenly interested in that consumer's digital life. At the push of a button, they can all deliver (or combat) exactly what the AI has compiled about us. Think of the Romans: bread and circuses for the people—that keeps things nice and quiet. These prospects are tempting for any investor or politician—to hell with democracy when things are so much easier with the right tech boys. 😗 And the beauty of it is that, ultimately, we finance it all ourselves (in one form or another—whether traditionally through taxes or in a modern way, by monetizing our digital lives).

Your life expectancy will be directly calculated based on your supermarket shopping list, your smartwatch, your fitness tracker, and your political (in)activities 😁, with the corresponding cost deducted from your digital wallet. And whatever falls outside the AI grid is still suitable for Soylent Green. 🤔

Big sorry, I’m completely digressing; of course, that’s totally impossible... or is it? Just thinking loud. 😉

Oh, and to answer the question: I have 120 TB of raw capacity available; if push comes to shove, I might have to consider reorganizing the parity drives and adopting a slightly less frequent backup strategy for data that can be reconstructed. I don't expect any problems until the hard drives start throwing error messages—and by then, I’ll need to have replacements on hand regardless.

JimmyH

Tinkerisk