Hard drives on backorder for two years as AI data centers trigger HDD shortage

And when the AI bubble bursts, "refurbished" HDDs and GPUs will flood the market. Save your money now and be prepared.

GPUs yes, but there'll be no HDDs making it alive, they'll get destroyed to protect whatever rubbish they had on.

HDD can be written multiple times with random data if data centers really have to protect what their former customers wrote on them. I never looked at those details in standard contracts.

There is also encryption at rest.

All you really need to do is write one pass of zeros on them. That will prevent anyone but a very dedicated adversary with expensive equipment from recovering any data, especially on TB scale drives.

Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.

I make a random 1MB chunk, then write that all over the drive, at overlapping offsets. I've been told that really clears it. On IDE-spinning-rust disks I trusted it, not sure if I should trust these modern SSD

Why rewrite the same 1MB chunk, instead of making new random chunks?

Redundant data at least opens the possibility that the drive could deduplicate.