The price of hard drives increased by 20% since the third quarter of last year, and the sector is even experiencing supply shortages, something unthinkable for a component that has virtually disappeared from the consumer market as a means of internal storage.

Complete PC, SSD, RAM, GPU, hard drives…. The rise of AI technologies They make all technology more expensive and you can already tell when you buy it. At least one hard drive maker, Western Digital, has expressed its intention to raise hard drive prices, according to a letter shared by a user TrendForce. A letter written by WD’s vice president last week explains this “Western Digital is experiencing higher-than-expected demand across its portfolio of hard drives and flash drives, creating supply constraints”.

This is why WD, the world’s leading manufacturer, will increase the price of hard drives and flash products in a strategy already started by other manufacturers such as Samsung. The strategy, as we warned, eventually materialized with an increase in the cost of DRAM and NAND memory and thus the final selling price of RAM modules and hard drives.

In the case of high-capacity hard drives, the widespread deployment of AI technologies is believed to be responsible for the large increase in demand for servers and data centers that must power AI functions. As there is a clear division between the business and consumer drive segments, the impact on end customer hard drive prices should in theory be low.

However, the price history of some sellers suggests that this may not be the case. Some WD and Seagate drives for sale at retailers such as Amazon, stating that they are consumer versions, significantly increased their price from the third quarter of 2023. Are consumers returning to hard drives as SSD prices rise? We don’t know, but it would be curious to see a “resurrection” of a format that has practically disappeared for internal storage.

And all this thanks to artificial intelligence. Microsoft has already warned that real “AI PCs” that want to run Windows 11 will need to have at least 16 GB of RAM (four times the minimum RAM requirement that has been set for the operating system so far). We’ll see if the requirements increase It is also not passed to the CPU due to the needs of neural processing units (NPUs) for hardware acceleration of AI functions, and the same can be said for graphics chips.

Frankly, if I needed to restore my computer or buy a component, it wouldn’t be too long since the trend suggests that the price of all technology will increase. Even hard drives…