I have been following quietly the Maidsafe project for years and have happily tried to set up a node using testnet v1 when it came out, not enough time to explore properly, but quite and exciting project and I am happy to be a part of it.
I thought it would be in the community’s interest to post this article regarding a shortage in HDDs. I have had this confirmed by my supplier in Hong Kong who has told us that a massive Chinese buyer has bought up all the high capacity hard drives creating a spike in prices in HK as well as a shortage - We were going to get a new NAS expansion bay for the photogrammetry work we do (nothing to do with Maidsafe[yet!] but now are faced with a big price hike.
Interesting read - something perhaps the community need to consider so that this does not create a problem with massive investment centralising or misdirecting the decentralised ambitions of the SAFE Network
As I explained in the topic of vampire attacks, this is quite possible. There are many big bags of fiat money in the world and people are willing to take risks. Therefore, it is extremely good that our community is waking up to this danger and taking action to deal with it:
Actually Safe has a big benefit here because it is targetting home users who will use their spare resources (that they already have) and no need to buy drives specifically.
Now for those wanting to set up their own dedicated node with a drive they will be in the minority of home users. And in all likelihood have drives from old systems and as network storage increases they can (slowly) buy larger drives.
My first thought too. A massive shortage of storage would be beneficial to Safe Network because of its ability to use the enormous amount of unused space on existing consumer devices, and every MB on all those single board computers (Raspberry Pi, Odroid, etc) that were bought to play and learn with, but are now sitting in a cupboard next to a box of computer cables, not to mention old hard drives, retired laptops and PCs which have been swapped out and not actually thrown away.
That was my understanding having spent quite a bit of time reading here;) I certainly intend setting up a few nodes in different locations to help. Hope we can all do the same!
Well there would be 500 million computers (not tablets, phones, specialised one) with a hard drive minimum around the world in use now. Could be much higher.
Most of the business/government/educational computers cannot be included until the network is quite large.
If you allocate 100GB for each computer on average, then its 50 billion GB. 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 (50 x 10^18) bytes or 50 Exa Bytes (if I have not made a mistake)
That was conservative, considering there are stats out there saying more like 1 billion desktop computers under 5-7 years old. Most likely with 500GB or higher drives and over half the space available, some with 1 to 2 TB or more free if less than 5 years old.
1 billion computers * 1000 billion (ave) bytes (TB) is 1 x 10^21 bytes. Thats 1 Zetta Byte
EDIT: and that is prob still conservative since SD cards are now that sort of storage and more computers able to store safe data. But not all computers will be nodes so unlikely to have even 1/10 as nodes
I’ve been waiting for a long time to get a good team for the Maid herd, and am I going to be late? Please tell me what I need to have a top team to be a Maid rancher … I’ll go buy it tomorrow, before it’s too late …
Pooling and sharing storage capacity will actually be a good thing, increasing utilization of hardware. A hard drive shortage will only drive people to the SAFE Network further promoting this pooling so it seems all good to me!
Hard to say at this point what will be best. The shortage will be only for a relatively short time comapred to the time before Safe launch. Shortage of say 6 months at most, but drives will still be available otherwise the drive manufacturers will kill off the retail market they desperately need to keep numbers up.
What will happen is that manufacturing will ramp up to match demand.
What type of GPU are you looking for? I’m thinking my next desktop won’t have a separate GPU at all, even for gaming. It looks like AMD will be turning out very powerful APU:s shortly.
I was looking for a RTX 3080 but I have ended up on a notification list for a 2070, then only if I am available the moment the notification comes through I may stand a chance.
Just about any GPU is sold out though.
Of course I can go pay a scalper on Amazon but I refuse to do that.
It is all connected. Some factories can swich what they do and they will produce what makes them most money. If making RAM for GPUs makes tmem most, they wont produce MLC/TLC memory for SSD drives.
Because of covid home-office trend and crypto mining, almost all microchip factories are overbooked and have long waitlist. The shortage is not in one particular product it spreads to allmost anything containing microchip.
