While the importance of archiving and maintaining quality records has risen, a new issue raises its head. The AI revolution is driving rapid construction of data centers and AI computing infrastructure that has devoured the world’s supply of memory chips – denying them to other uses, including drives.
On their most recent earnings call, Western Digital has said they’re almost out of hard drives for the year; as we’re not even fully into Q2 2026, that has dire implications. The same drives are needed for increasing storage, no matter if it is in-house on-premises hardware or offloaded to a Cloud provider.
This is a very visible pattern in today’s tech world; HDD and SSD consumer prices have skyrocketed as a combination of rising demand and falling supply manifests in acute shortages. Manufacturers are having to compete for critical parts in a seller’s market, and those costs are being passed on down the line even as overall volume falls.
What now?
Combined with the ongoing push for digitization and regulatory pressure towards establishing archives adhering to data handling best practices, we can expect organizations to find themselves between a rock and a hard place as their storage becomes relatively more scarce and expensive.
We can anticipate that two features of data management software will become far more important almost overnight – quality compression and deduplication will go from nice-to-have features to almost a necessity in order to keep data volumes manageable.
Your Data In Your Hands – With TECH-ARROW
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