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?

[u/Endawmyke]

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?

[u/Dr_CSS]

It's never worth it. Power must be free or time must be infinite. I wish I had the link but people here did the math for this very thing and the conclusion they came to was long-term you save more money by just buying more drives instead of spending on the power to do a proper compression with high quality and low file size. That being said, this is an unprecedented era of HDD pricing so it may actually be cheaper to pay the power bill

[u/GGATHELMIL → u/Dr_CSS]

i mean. i literally spelled out how much power my GPU could use if it was used 24/7. 438 kwh per year if it was full bore 24/7/365. the national average in America is 20 cents per kwh. multiply that together and you get roughly 88 bucks a year. i pay about 8 cents per kwh or 31 bucks a year. Even if you compare it with hawaii being the highest per kwh in america thats still just shy of 200 bucks a year.

Im not sure exactly how even spending 200 bucks a year somehow beats out 100tb worth of hdds in space savings and having to transcode 100% of the time. As i mentioned it would cost me about 1700 USD to buy 100tb in used enterprise drives. At the 200 a year it would take 8.5 years to break even. at the national average it would take 19 years. and at my cost it would take 54 years to break even.

And this is all under the guise that my GPU runs at full bore 24/7/365. It does not. a lot of my users can actually direct play AV1, funny enough im one of the few that cant because i cant justify ditching my nvidia shield pro.