Not even two days ago there as a article of backlog on HDDs for AI. Because everybody and their grandmother wants to store the entire internet, out of fear that AI scraping will become more difficult. Aka, they are gating data. And yes, you can train AI easily on HDD even with their lower IOPS. The fact that you got a few 1000 in parallel does the trick, and its often bandwidth issues that hit harder.
I just stockpiled a few extra 4TB NVME because i learned my lesson. NVME has not been dropping in prices after the manufacture pushed it up, and AI is going to keep eating NVME storage for a long time. Let alone HDD storage...
Welcome to the new normal ... Crypto miners killing GPU prices, HDD Crypto miners, Crypto miners again back with a vengeance, O pandemic, everybody needs hardware... Short time of benefits because of over production (on NVME especially, manufacture cut back production) AAAAND .. here comes AI.
Its something every fying year.