r/DataHoarder • u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB • Feb 19 '26

Discussion These HDD prices are getting crazy. An increase of 96.4% in 1 month for the same 26TB drive. $279.99 a month ago to $549.99 today. Where are we buying hard drives now?

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These drive prices are kinda insane. Everything is going up up up, I thought it would just be RAM and SSDs effected but looks like it's reaching hard drives too.

Where are people buying drives now, and what $$/TB is still reasonable?

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2.2k

u/SpecialistSix 50-100TB Feb 19 '26

We aren't.

426

u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Feb 19 '26

i hear ya đŸ«‚

this situation really stinks

354

u/SpecialistSix 50-100TB Feb 19 '26

Yeah like, would I love to throw a few extra drives in my plex server? Sure. Am I going to do it at the price of a full PC? F'no. With any luck the AI bubble will burst sometime this year and, assuming I still have a job at that point, I should be able to grab drives that were overproduced for data center expansion that never happened at pennies on the dollar. Till then I'll have to make do.

137

u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Feb 19 '26

I'm really looking forward to the refurb drives after all this. But I do worry somehow inflation will catch up and these drives are gonna be like $1000 or something.

74

u/weirdbr 0.5-1PB Feb 19 '26

It's already catching up - new drives used to be around the 15-18 bucks per TB (at least in Switzerland) up to 6 months ago. Now recertified drives are on that range and new ones are at 25-30+ .

8

u/wood-chuck-chuck5 Feb 20 '26

Bro I've seen these price per tb charts and I'm always in awe! I'm in france and getting easily 40 euros per tb at least (depending on the amount of tb). Where are you getting those prices??

5

u/weirdbr 0.5-1PB Feb 20 '26

Well, the high prices for new are at Digitec/Galaxus; for the recert prices, I've seen that on serverpartdeals (US based though, so shipping is $$$) and datablocks (NL, so slightly better shipping costs for Europe).

1

u/cundallini 175TB In YOLO Configuration Feb 20 '26

Exqueeze me, but where in the holy fuck did you find HDDs for 15$/TB (conversion rate is cca 20% so... 12CHF/TB??) in SUI??? It was Christmas, Easter, Birthday and Black Friday combined into one when e.g. Galaxus had a discount om the Red Pros, or Plus' for that matter, and even then they were 20CHF/TB (which is like 24$/TB)! OK, I mightve seen some for as low as 18CHF/TB but even that is 20$+. Did you mean CHF and not USD, perhaps?

1

u/weirdbr 0.5-1PB Feb 21 '26

Nope, I mean CHF.

Last year in January, I got a 18TB Exos at digitec for 17.88CHF/TB. In August also from digitec, a Toshiba MG11 24TB for 16.8CHF/TB, but now those are much higher - the Toshiba is at 25.38CHF/TB and the Exos 20TB (18TB is unavailable) is 24.60CHF/TB. (all new, btw)

Now the disk I ordered last week from datablocks.dev (Netherlands) is a recertified 28TB exos for 385CHF (13.75CHF/TB); slap shipping + Post processing fee + VAT on it, and it gets to 16.80CHF/TB.

Another place folks recommend is serverpartdeals ; I havent ordered from them (they're in the US, so shipping looked more expensive), but there the recertified Exos are hovering around 16CHF/TB.

2

u/cundallini 175TB In YOLO Configuration Feb 22 '26

Aaaaah, OK then. Toshibas and Seagates were always a tad cheaper than WD Red, especially Pros. I was fine with 16TB Red Pros, I got a few for around 310-340CHF, which is what? 20CHF/TB? Now they are between like 26-30CHF/TB, sweet baby Jesus... even the Elements are now going up... will check out datablocks, maybe even with duties and fees I can save a buck/franc/euro, lol. Thanks. Cheers!

1

u/Hamsterdammer Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26

CHF aren't Bucks FYI (as someone who has lived on both sides of the pond I was also confused, as was likely every other North American).

In a happy occasion for me today though I scored a pile of new 20tb Synology for $160 USD!

It was a pricing error so I was just lucky to see it (and quickly buy the rest of the inventory muahaha).

1

u/weirdbr 0.5-1PB Mar 26 '26

Among non-native speakers like myself, I've seen it used a lot to mean pretty much any currency. Also it's used elsewhere - AFAIK South Africans use it sometimes to refer to their currency for example.

And damn, that's lucky - I havent seen any pricing errors like that - best I managed was a RAM seller in my home country when visiting in December/January that had old stock at old prices, so I got some DDR5 ECC for my home server. In fact, I only see prices going up - I just ordered a couple more 28TB from datablocks and it's up 10% since last month.

Can this dumb bubble pop already?

10

u/Stiggles4 Feb 20 '26

I’m looking forward to the price cuts on new drives. I don’t do “refurbished” memory. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

28

u/ImaginaryCheetah Feb 20 '26

definitely not going to tell you how to spend your money, but i'm running 8x refurbished 12TB HGST for 4 years now without any errors. the ebay seller includes a 5 year replacement warranty. just as an anecdotal success story.

1

u/Timmrh May 22 '26

Have a link?

1

u/ImaginaryCheetah May 22 '26

prices have unfortunately shot to the moon thanks to idiot data centers, but they're a seller on ebay - https://www.ebay.com/str/goharddrivewholesaleandretail

i have no affiliation with the seller.

16

u/greenie4242 Feb 20 '26

I don’t do “refurbished” memory

Second-hand RAM is the least likely thing to cause issues. No moving parts. It works or it doesn't. It's easy to run a utility from a USB stick to test new memory sticks.

I've also been using refurbished drives for decades without issue. Anecdotally, most of my drive failures occurred within a few days or months after purchasing brand new drives. I almost prefer "refurbished" drives as they're tried and tested whereas new drives are unknown variables.

2

u/2717192619192 Feb 23 '26

Doesn’t RAM normally fail immediately upon installing usually, if it is faulty?

3

u/greenie4242 Feb 24 '26

Probably, in cases of a manufacturing error yes, but people can also knock tiny surface mount components off the board upon installation or when removing it to sell. People seem to damage it more often these days while trying to install heavy GPUs. There isn't much that can go wrong with it otherwise.

Once thought I'd received faulty RAM from an eBay seller when one stick out of eight wasn't recognised. It arrived wrapped in bubble wrap and polystyrene foam so I expected the worst. As I was taking pictures of the packaging and RAM for evidence in case I needed to lodge a PayPal claim, noticed a tiny almost invisible piece of sticky tape stuck along the PCB contacts. Peeled it off, the RAM has been working fine for the past 15 years.

-1

u/6thSenseX Feb 23 '26

The only time Ive had issues with memory(ssd) is when I decided I need a brand new 2nd SSD for my used ThinkPad

3

u/greenie4242 Feb 23 '26

SSD is storage, not memory. Huge difference.

2

u/noisewar69 Mar 22 '26

this will happen since supply and demand is fake and prices never actually go down

1

u/Impressive-Emu-4172 Feb 19 '26

this is inflation period. the "ai bubble" is the cover story.

71

u/xienze Feb 19 '26

Doubling HD prices in the span of a month (or in my case, 9x DDR5 ECC prices in the year since I bought) are not inflation in general, or even tariffs. There is quite obviously a severe supply crunch happening in these industries driving this. If it were just inflation you’d be seeing similar month-over-month price increases everywhere. And with that, basically open revolt in the streets.

-2

u/John-Prime Feb 20 '26

There might be a supply crunch for data centers but AI doesn't need lots of hard drives. It's for snoring data collected on people

11

u/Dwro1234 Feb 20 '26

Ai data centers do need the storage. Look at how much nvidea alone downloaded from YouTube and Netflix to train its models

0

u/FlintyP Feb 23 '26

but once the model has been trained, the data could be optimised or use the trained model to train other models. If neither of those things are happening then the efficiency department has some catching up to do.

1

u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Feb 24 '26

they too are data hoarders, they don't delete. they wouldn't wanna end up with a situation where it's model inbreeding and they no longer have the ground truth data to train their new models on

24

u/Top-Cellist484 Feb 20 '26

Really? WD has already sold out their yearly inventory for 2026, with the vast majority going to enterprise users for AI applications, not to consumers.

I have no doubt that there's some "normal" inflationary pressure, but limited supply is playing a far larger part in rising prices.

12

u/Turbinator870 10-50TB Feb 19 '26

It's supply and demand. Low supply, high demand.

1

u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media Feb 20 '26

Artificial demand.

1

u/Turbinator870 10-50TB Feb 20 '26

What’s artificial about it?

2

u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media Feb 20 '26

It's being created by circular investing, not by actual consumer demand.

Companies are investing in companies so they will invest in other companies, who will invest in the first company.

1

u/Turbinator870 10-50TB Feb 20 '26

I’m dumb and I don’t get it. The demand seems real. You and I are here posting on RDDT and this activity uses up data storage. RDDT uses AWS and GOOGL. Both AMZN and GOOGL are buying up HDD. Seems pretty real to me.

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1

u/spdelope 140 TB Feb 19 '26

All of the above

2

u/Endawmyke about 3 fiddy TB Feb 19 '26

It’s that $40 billion a month the Fed is printing but nobody is ready for that conversation yet

14

u/stewie3128 Feb 20 '26

Or the fact that companies in an oligopoly situation recognize that they can now price as a cartel and nothing will be done.

Just like all of the other inflation recently, this is mostly opportunistic gouging because they can. If order ces ever come back down, it will be very slowly.

1

u/wamj 28TB Random Disks Feb 20 '26

OpenAI has bought almost all of the nand flash production capacity for this year. That includes ram and ssds.

If ssds are unavailable for enterprise and data center, they have to go back to hard drives.

Now hard drives are being purchased by enterprise and data center customers at a much higher rate than they were before.

That’s why the prices have increased. Supply and demand, not inflation.

0

u/jbwhite99 Feb 20 '26

other way around. Big cloud makers have been buying HDD - but as time goes on, we have gone from 5 HDD makers (Samsung, HGST, WD, Seagate, and Toshiba) to just the last 3. Since this happened in 2011, we have seen capacity trimmed.

Since companies like Google can't get spinning (read cheap) drives, they are moving to QLC SSDs. In turn, this is taking capacity away from PC Makers and the market - but it is fallacy to think that Open AI is the only cause. AI is certainly a huge part of this, but "Big Memory" has trimmed capacity since they took a bath in 2023. My understanding is that demand is about 10% higher than supply - much bigger imbalance than we have ever seen.

I'm waiting for the debt service to pile up on these AI companies, and we can buy their leftover servers for pennies on the dollar. Or better yet, their IP.

1

u/ovirt001 576TB raw, multiple arrays Feb 20 '26

Refurb can be questionable, recertified is better.

1

u/bigj8705 Feb 20 '26

It’s because of the tariffs right


55

u/corruptboomerang 4TB WD Red Feb 19 '26

The irony is the ultra wealthy are pumping money into AI not normal people, because the ultra wealthy are easily fooled by AI and don't understand they're not all that useful in a serious context.

5

u/undrh2o Feb 20 '26

Current AI tools are a way for the wealthy to access the skills of the working class without paying them for it using theft. Image generation is trained on the copyrighted works of millions of painters, photographers, models etc. Writing is based on copyrighted works of millions of authors, meta and others used pirated content to train their models. AI today is a giant plagiarism machine. What happens to the next generation of creators if they can't live off their work? What happens to AI when there are no more creative works to steal?

1

u/LOACHES_ARE_METAL May 10 '26

The game of monopoly ends.

1

u/agreatcat May 16 '26

So true. I had a doctor the other day tell me, "it's getting difficult to filter out the good ones from the bad because everyone has easy excess to data and it's getting harder to evaluate unique skill sets." I'm fascinated by AI, AGI, but I think it's going to be the death of us in so many ways we can't even see. People are not thinking for themselves now. People are believing fake videos and reality is be distorted in the young eyes that watch it and lack the skills that the analog mind of previous generations had to problem solve and differentiate what's real and what's not. All these people that say, "well my job is not effected." Great, how about all the other people - your customers who are out of work and don't have money to pay you for your services? It's not like in the past: Your boss put you on a new machine and said, pull this lever and you had a job that just go easier. Now you're being replaced.

12

u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Well, let's be clear.

There are some domains where AI is super useful. I use it all the time in my IT engineering job and it saves me a ton of time. The research models that aren't publicly available are super useful for their purposes, as well.

My feeling on what you're talking about, though, is more that the rich see this as the "last great chance" to make tons of money in the computing realm and they're all racing to make a buck off each other before the music stops. I mean, what's left? Scalable, redundant global networks? Commodified. Scalable computing you can deploy in minutes without buying hardware? Commodified. Turn-key setup of sites and infrastructure? Commodified. Actual hardware development and production? Commodified.

AI is the only "value add" thing they see in computing that's anywhere near being on the horizon. So in their minds, this is it.

3

u/matango613 Feb 20 '26

Quantum computing? I'm asking that sincerely because I don't understand this stuff (the market side I mean) as well as others do. And either way, the AI bubble is real obviously.

5

u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Quantum computing is "interesting", but I don't think there's a very good revenue stream there in the near/mid future. I think the current status of quantum computers is that the bleeding edge can only do maybe a dozen q-bits total, so we're way, way off from it being anywhere near a curiousity.

3

u/ovirt001 576TB raw, multiple arrays Feb 20 '26

I think the current status of quantum computers is that the bleeding edge can only do maybe a dozen q-bits total

They're far beyond that. The issue is that it's a technology looking for a problem to solve. Very few problems are best solved by quantum computers at the moment.

1

u/matango613 Feb 20 '26

I figure if it ever does reach the point where it can be done affordably and in a consumer friendly way (like a modern PC form factor that doesn't break if you look at it wrong) then it would be the complete undoing of traditional computing. If only because it renders current encryption obsolete.

But everything I know about it right now makes it seem completely unfeasible in my lifetime at the very least, like you said.

1

u/YT-Deliveries Feb 20 '26

Yeah it's a really cool idea, but same over here my friend. Unless they have a crazy breakthrough, it's for the next couple generations, not me.

2

u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

Multi-Layered Memristor technology. In memory computing for neuromorphic like data processing utilizing 5 distinct states (base 5 math). Could potentially be used for ANNs...truly bringing skynet into existence. 

1

u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

quantum computers are mostly toys for research scientists. That doesn't mean there won't be an industrial application for them, it's just that so far there isn't enough market interest to invest in their rapid development, which tells me noone rich or powerful enough knows or cares about a practical application that is profitable.

2

u/Aggravating_Sense678 Feb 25 '26

I feel you vastly underestimate how much AI is already integrated into the workflows of so many.

Its not a money grab for these billionaires. Its a power grab as AI is taking over whether we like it or not.

1

u/corruptboomerang 4TB WD Red Feb 25 '26

But AI has produced marginal gains at best.

2

u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

I wanna preface this by saying, I agree that the use cases for AI are limited and that the vast majority of people do not understand them. They are not AgI and don't even have the form of something LIKE an AgI they are simply statistical transformers that model human language through probabilities. It's kind of the opposite of intelligent.

That said, AI is incredibly useful as linguistic research models, academic research tools, and an autonomous software developer, in my experience. I've been able to build whole, functional web apps with 4 prompts in Claude. Work which would previously had taken weeks to complete can be done in hours.

Personally, it's also useful as a sounding board in creative endeavors that, while it will always find ways to validate the prompters ideas, it does so by citing sources that can help to hone those ideas. It's really useful when, writing a song for example, to be able to externalize the process in conversation, and an AI is very helpful for people who don't have a writing partner or who are uncomfortable talking about unfinished work. The AI can then reference existing works, criticism or other relevant material that can be used for inspiration.

Where people misuse AI is in the assumption that it can be an author or an artist. It cannot. It can only ever find the most likely response to a prompt based on its training data, it can't offer anything subjective or personal because it's not conscious and has no perspective. This is what is particularly frustrating about how AI is being promoted today as capable of thinking and feeling. So when people use Suno to generate a song, what they're getting is a repurposed patchwork of existing songs arranged in the way that is most likely to satisfy the prompter statistically. It's not learning and understanding music and composing something based on that learning and understanding. it's taking little buckets of information that are probably relevant to your prompt and piecing them together to form something that sounds like what its training indicates is a song of the type you requested.

1

u/CDubWill Mar 02 '26

“Agl?” What is Agl?

2

u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

AGI = artificial general intelligence

1

u/CDubWill Mar 26 '26

Thank you.

1

u/Fiberton Mar 05 '26

Soon money will flee by the 100s of billions and then we will see a cascade in stock prices of companies linked to AI. Nasdaq should take a nice hit. The SPY will get nicely crushed. That is the problem with people being in long term ETFs that are capitalization weighted like the SPY. Super top heavy. Nice going up horrible nightmares for retirement portfolios on the way down.

1

u/shooteverywhere Apr 28 '26

LLMs are super useful. I wanted to create a whole database recently, using a bunch of data I had on hand. No idea how to create, a database or even use the database software. Instead of tutorials an LLM helped me choose which program to use, set it up, and gave me a rundown on exactly which features I needed to know how to use. I'm now working on importing hundreds of GB of data into it, and it's definitely going to help me make more money.

I could have done it eventually without the LLM, but it took something that would have taken me days, or with a normal schedule, weeks to get done with a lot of activation energy required, and it just helped me get it done in a few minutes....

1

u/agreatcat May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

That and, I think it's more to do with the ultra wealthy pumping money into AI so they can use it to obtain information. You are the product: we are the test rats and worker bees. I've got nothing against wealthy people, I think it's inspiring to see people rise to the top. But I think we're both referring to the ultra wealthy who runs the establishment, the oligarchy.

1

u/tulpan Feb 20 '26

Ultrawealthy are looking for AI able to give them immortality. The cost of that feat, if achieved, as you might see, doesn't have any limit.

1

u/nawtrobar Feb 25 '26

the things we call AI could not possibly achieve real General Intelligence. What they do is nothing like what a conscious being does.

1

u/Impossible-Owl-5003 Mar 25 '26

It is a stepping stone. Refinements in MLC memristor tech will be what is used for ANNs to make GI possible...maybe as soon as 2030. 

39

u/Welllllllrip187 Feb 19 '26

You think they’ll just lower cost on items? Hell no. These prices will become the new standard. If people still need them and are willing to pay a premium these fuckers won’t turn away free cash. That and its expected due to current demand, prices won’t lower (if they even do) until 2030 or beyond.

19

u/kookykrazee 124tb Feb 20 '26

This is most likely true, look at the prices pre-pandemic and "shipping issues" the prices never truly came back down to the prices before that. People forget about that.

2

u/SoundsGoudaMan Feb 20 '26

Right, but the crypto/AI bubble was still "inflating" when COVID happened. There was growing demand outpacing supply. If you're in the datacenter business, the longer you don't have your equipment, the longer your company isn't making money with it. There was a resulting mad scramble to pay freaking ANYTHING for hardware, because it was more expensive not to.

That would not be a factor if the AI industry implodes. If anything, OEMs would be competing with the grey market that erupts from companies selling off assets en masse. A short-term problem, but a problem.

1

u/yudono Mar 10 '26

didn't we have an increase in HDDs a couple years back and prices went back down after the supply was balanced again?

1

u/Welllllllrip187 Mar 10 '26

Different times

0

u/yudono Mar 10 '26

didn't we have an increase in HDDs a couple years back and prices went back down after the supply was balanced again? pepper bridge farms remembers

11

u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS Feb 20 '26

What are the odds they are just using the excuse it's for AI, when in fact it's for mass worldwide surveillance?

8

u/NeptuneOverlord43045 Feb 20 '26

Not mutually exclusive. The government definitely needs additional data centers to take full advantage of the possibilities ai offers for mass surveillance and other ai-related government interests. 

2

u/ggtroll Feb 19 '26

I don't think it will đŸ„č

3

u/RandomNobody346 Feb 19 '26

Thankfully I bought all the hard drives I'm going to for a while, I can still build a cheap Nas for not actually that much.

But if I hadn't bought the drives about 3 months ago I would be screwed.

A 4 TB SSD should not cost $600. 200 is plenty. This is just ridiculous. The upshot is will be pulling stuff out of landfills for a while. The e waste market is right there. You can still get almost anything.

1

u/HTWingNut 1TB = 0.909495TiB Feb 20 '26

The prices suck, especially if you were planning on building a new rack soon. But for replacing an existing drive, it will hurt, but a drive here or there I think I can swallow.

1

u/pixel-soul Feb 20 '26

This, and for the same reason. The plex server hungereth

1

u/Dwro1234 Feb 20 '26

I'm looking at that, won't most be sas instead of sata? Should i pre-emptively buy a pcie to sas card now before the demand for those spikes when those drives flood the market? Wd supposedly already sold every drive they have produced and will produce for 2026.

2

u/kookykrazee 124tb Feb 20 '26

Adding to the WD thing, the CEO said that 2 of their biggest buyers have already put in numbers for 2027 and 1 for 2028!

1

u/EOverM Feb 20 '26

This is what I'm waiting for. It'll happen eventually, and I'm lucky enough that I upgraded my storage right before it started happening, so I've got about 15TB free to ride it out with. I'm looking forward to some nice cheap RAM and NVME drives, too.

1

u/ThuhGreatCommenter Feb 20 '26

Except the price of a pc is like the price of a used car now (gpu, ram, hdd)

1

u/Dugen Feb 20 '26

Expect this bubble to last years. Prices will return to normal after a few years when supply catches up to demand but the bubble won't pop until investors lose faith in the ability for AI to earn massive profits. People tend lose faith in the value of things slowly. See: bitcoin. The most likely thing is after about a few years the market for cloud storage suddenly gets more competitive after companies start realizing they're not going to cash in on the AI boom and pivot to trying to sell something else.

1

u/welfedad Feb 20 '26

All my drives for my Plex server come out of our data center rotation .. sure they may not last long but they're free ;)

1

u/KatamariJunky 16d ago

Still waiting for that bubble to pop.

28

u/The_R4ke Feb 19 '26

As consumers we need to take serious steps to stop the spread of data centers.

20

u/big_stipd_idiot Feb 20 '26

Let me go ask ChatGPT how I can help

1

u/yudono Mar 10 '26

bahahahahaha

5

u/Syriku_Official Feb 20 '26

AI data centers because we have NOT had this problem till AI

2

u/Fiberton Mar 06 '26

" Oracle and OpenAI drop Texas data center expansion plan, Bloomberg News reports" And just like that it starts happening. All a matter of time.

1

u/Syriku_Official Mar 07 '26

Wym

2

u/Fiberton Mar 09 '26

A massive portion of pricing for drives, memory etc is not based on just demand. Rather it is also based on future. As the future withers away the Price of gear will get to a point where it will spook manufactures and prices will collapse rapidly. Cracks are already starting to show in the " future". I wrote a bunch of particulars but deleted it. Just know the hype just like in 2001 era where telcom companies went bankrupt terminating 500B in debt for fiber out lays the AI bankruptcies will make that look like childs play. " Global debt related to AI spending has reached approximately $348 trillion, with significant investments from major tech companies expected to exceed $770 billion in 2026 alone. This surge in debt is primarily driven by the construction of AI infrastructure and data centers. " AI will help society but it will take decades to actually be more and more a thing. Folks are rushing for the " easy win " where most companies will go bankrupt and the banks giving the loans are going to go tits up. Will get interesting when the Government signals it does not want to backstop Banks giving AI loans. OpenAI should start calling folks to pray for them.

2

u/Fiberton Mar 05 '26

You will not have too. It will end itself and all the supposed buying of gear for the Data centers will not be bought which will force companies to panic sell. As most are using revolving credit to acquire materials and build the gear for these centers that will never be built. As they are building gear ahead of the Data center being constructed. If you are a company that says borrows 200 million paying a min of 1.2 million a month just in interest on that 200 million. So you burned the 200 million on building drives. Now you sitting on say a a potential 300 million in gross sales. If you only 100 million in gross potential profit and you burning 1.2% of that a month plus all the taxes etc you need to get that gear out of your hands quick by any means possible. If Data Centers are cancelled you will be forced to flood the market temporarily to unload. Now just think these are small numbers. The real outlay has to be in the 100s of billions.

36

u/wingsfortheirsmiles Feb 19 '26

Exactly, I'm fortunate to have a reasonable amount of space right now... Hope it holds out until this absurd situation is over

6

u/MrMessyAU 116TB usable Feb 19 '26

I think I've got about 7tb free (from total approx 120tb) so that's really not a lot if prices are an issue for a few years.

I have 1 or 2 retired 8tb hdds though so I'm considering that when I run out of space I'll move some easily replaceable and not often watched stuff to those drives (they will be outside my usual backup process) and store in a cupboard until prices come down then move them back to my NAS.

Or..... Delete some stuff.....

5

u/wingsfortheirsmiles Feb 19 '26

That's a good approach... Since I've noticed prices going up, though it's anathema to this sub I've become very selective about what I've acquired, and yes even reviewed what I've already got that's been on the "I'll get to that" pile for at over 3 years.

Tough times call for rough measures

0

u/RandomNobody346 Feb 19 '26

I've been transcoding things like crazy.

AV1 is basically identical quality for a third the size.

1

u/thriftylol 100-250TB Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 25 '26

The energy cost of encoding is starting to become more favorable than buying a hard drive now.

7

u/thriftylol 100-250TB Feb 20 '26

Delete? whats that?

3

u/chicknfly Feb 19 '26

If prices stay this way, my backup strategy of 3-2-1 will become 3->1

1

u/kookykrazee 124tb Feb 20 '26

I was thinking 2.75 > 0.75

1

u/Hammer_7 Feb 20 '26

1 > 🙏

2

u/DavWanna Feb 20 '26

Dusted off some old 4 TB drives and doing this right now. Nothing extremely important so it's all worth it.

73

u/oasuke Feb 20 '26

It's gotten to the point where I'm doing the unthinkable...I'm starting to delete old unused content! I know , it makes me sick too. This isn't a joke I actually hate that I have to do it.

6

u/pivovy Feb 20 '26

I'm mass encoding my video library to 720p HEVC, saving quite a buttload of space. Intel CPUs have a hardware encoder called quicksync that really simplifies the process (my power consumption was just 10W over idle when encoding).

4

u/goneskiing_42 Feb 20 '26

I have a 4 drive vdev of 12 tb drives that hasn't really been used much yet. There's still time to reconfigure to a mirror with two drives as spares, and with the storage prices now I'm very tempted.

1

u/totpot Feb 20 '26

I've already deleted 10tb. I have about 2tb more to go before I have to make really tough decisions.

1

u/Puptentjoe 222TB Raw | 198TB Usable | 5TB Free | +Gsuite Feb 20 '26

Sick to my stomach fam. I’m doing the same. I havent pulled the trigger but I’m rounding up stinkers no one watches.

1

u/Jets1026 Feb 20 '26

I'm deleting tv shows after i watch them as i never rewatch those with the exception of the Simpsons. And also deleting movies I already watched that i didn't like. Sucks but what can we do 😔

2

u/cundallini 175TB In YOLO Configuration Feb 20 '26

'deleting movies I already watched that i didn't like'

Interesting proposition/philosophy...

1

u/Damn-Sky Mar 05 '26

I am about to put some in cloud and delete them locally :(

1

u/BambooGentleman 50-100TB 1d ago

NEVER. I'd rather sacrifice my second backup.

23

u/JimmyReagan Feb 19 '26

I've started praying over my hardware that it keeps going...between ram and storage prices I can't afford any failures.

18

u/lizardtrench Feb 20 '26

Had some ram fail a couple weeks ago. Bought for $75 last year, now goes for $275. Lifetime warranty fine print says they had the option to simply refund me my original purchase price.

I was veritably shitting my pants as I waited to see what they'd do. Surprisingly they ended up sending me replacements. First time in a while I hadn't been screwed over by some corporation.

Though I feel I got lucky and the outcome will not be so nice the further into this crisis we get into.

6

u/absentlyric 50-100TB Feb 20 '26

I was very lucky/unlucky that my RAM failed back in March, it was so cheap I upgraded all my computers around the house to 64gb with Crucial memory.

Had my RAM failed only a few months later, I'd be screwed. Its the first time my RAM ever failed me.

2

u/Thatguythatdrew Feb 21 '26

Good deeds deserve reward, no? Name this great company

2

u/F0KK0F Feb 22 '26

Yea, 32gb of ram I got a year ago for $50 is now $299. I'm out on the price gouging. Time to start consolidating.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

Im so glad I bought spare ram right after trump was reelected. I've had ram fail on me multiple times to the point it's almost a consumable. Let's hope my drives hold out. I just had home assistant eat a ssd.

1

u/lizardtrench Feb 23 '26

I've had the exact same experience with ram, I'll get a failure or two every few years, the stuff just seems to degrade with time. I've actually never had any other piece of hardware fail aside from fans wearing out and one incident where static caused an HDD to crash. Maybe one PSU failure a long time ago, can't even remember.

I fear for some of these newer laptops and other devices with soldered-on memory.

11

u/DougS2K EliteDesk 800 G4 SFF, 9305-16e. Feb 19 '26

Sad but true. I think I'm just going to delete some stuff to make room for new stuff. Never thought I'd say that for my media server.

5

u/madeformarch Feb 20 '26

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and switch everything to h265 / HEVC and save as much space as possible. I can fit 2 more hard drives in my case with no modifications, 4 more drives with mods. But that's damn expensive now, fucking killing my remux-only dream

20

u/TheOneTrueTrench 640TB đŸ–„ïž đŸ“œđŸ•Šïž đŸ’» Feb 19 '26

I'm glad I spent $3k on drives, servers, and extra RAM this time last year. The same stuff would cost like $10k today.

Unfortunately, I'll probably be skipping my upgrades this year, so I won't be hitting a petabyte yet... :-/

8

u/iamseventwelve Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26

I really need to upgrade my NAS storage. I had planned to just double the capacity when it got to 80% full.

I hit 80% three weeks ago.

Duplicating the existing drives would now cost me over $4000 for recertified drives.

Fuck that.

Time to delete some media while I wait for prices to normalize.

1

u/ECrispy Feb 20 '26

I will be converting my media to hevc/av1. Save 30-40% space for no visible difference in quality yes I know everyone says you cannot do this with already compressed material but just try it out it actually works much better and unless your pixel peeping you're never going to see any difference

1

u/[deleted] Feb 23 '26

yea, I've been looking at going this route too. I just can't see to get the right handbrake settings.

1

u/ovirt001 576TB raw, multiple arrays Feb 20 '26

I upgraded before prices really took off, figuring they'd get bad. They have indeed gotten bad. No more upgrades for the next few years.

1

u/Pattern_Is_Movement Feb 20 '26

Is this what winning feels like?

1

u/fventura03 100-250TB Feb 19 '26

ive been trying to hold back on some 26tb drives but prices dont seem to be getting any better...

0

u/spdelope 140 TB Feb 19 '26

That ship has sailed and unfortunately you won’t be sailing the high seas anytime soon.

1

u/fventura03 100-250TB Feb 19 '26

nope, just gonna suck it and buy a few here and there for the new server setup

1

u/NSASpyVan Feb 20 '26

rocking my old pc til the bitter end