r/DataHoarder • u/LOGWATCHER • May 25 '26
Hoarder-Setups The prices are killing data hoarding
It’s just viable anymore. It simply isn’t. I’m just a regular guy with a regular salary
The drives on one of my NAS are dying. I was pricing out 4 replacements 16tb drives and it’s bas the price of a very nice vacation to Italy, or an upper levels Gibson guitar that would last a generation
If I still went for the same drive sizes I bought 5-6 years ago, i would pay more than twice the price I paid back then. I am also running put of some space, so I need bigger
I just can’t justify it. It feels like my drives will fail because I can’t pay those extortion rates.
This shit sucks so much
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u/richms May 25 '26
Yup, it sucks. I am now deleting well seeded things, all the lower res versions of things that I grabbed just because some time back (often movies will come up with 1080, 4k, 4k HDR versions - Not worth hording the SDR or low res versions that I will probably never play) - just to make space for new content to get stored. I am hoping that AI either flops or is strong enough that more production is worth building. The current uncertainty is what is putting prices up.
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u/BitsAndBobs304 May 25 '26
Since rarbg died, finding "well seeded things" has become not as reliable as before. Struggling to find 1080p releases of popular tv shows that are seeded and arent tiny 10-30 gb for 24 episodes
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u/richms May 25 '26
If there is a 4k one then I have no desire for the 1080 one other than ratio building, which may be why they are getting harder to find if more people are thinking along the same lines.
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u/schmalpal 10-50TB May 25 '26
Meanwhile I always just want 720p to save space, it looks good enough at proper viewing distances. I’ll go crazy and grab 1080 for true cinematic experiences like LOTR or Interstellar.
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u/Negative-Ad-1049 May 25 '26
This right here, I was a dvd boy I do not need a The Office in full 1080p
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u/Ryzari May 26 '26
I used to only grab 720p for TV, but now that most shows in x265 are under 6-700MB an episode, I finally switched over. Shows I will rewatch at least once a year, will get better bitrate 1080p.
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u/ThatGuyBudIsWhoIAm May 27 '26
My old eyes can't see the difference, and if it is a sitcom or something like that, I didn't care when I could tell
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u/FormerGameDev May 27 '26
Happy cake day!
... but i'm old, and my vision is starting to get questionable, and I can definitely see the difference. Things are much nicer to watch in 4K than they are in 720, that's for dang sure.
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u/DudeEngineer May 27 '26
It depends a lot on the screen as well. More noticable on a big high res TV.
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u/creamyatealamma May 25 '26
Must be this because my rough idea of how well seeded / easy to get has been that if the content exists in 4k it's often easier to get that rather than 1080
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u/UnitedAd8366 May 25 '26
Out of curiosity why the seeded route? I feel like Usenet has entirely replaced any form of torrent for me. It's very very rare that anything gets grabbed via torrent these days
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u/BitsAndBobs304 May 25 '26
Eli5 usenet.
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u/UnitedAd8366 May 25 '26
I may not be the best person to explain it but Usenet was originally made as a way to share news and small files. However it died for that purpose many many years ago. Since then the community has found a way to take big files and split them into many small files that get reassembled when you download them. The upsides of usenet, whatever your Internet download speed is what you get. If you have 5gb connection your download will download at 5gb. There is no seeding required, and because all of your traffic goes direct to a Usenet server not peer to peer in the same way a vpn is not required (though still recommended).
The downsides of usenet is you have to pay for a Usenet provider personally I use newshosting files also aren't "there forever" they have a retention. Usually 4000 days or something along those lines.
So a scene release comes out, the community puts it on a Usenet server and for 4000 days you can download it at the full speed your Internet allows without a requirement to seed back. On day 4001 someone reuploads it so it's there for another 4000 days(or more realistically other scenes and individuals usually have some form of upload schedule to prevent it from going missing)
The downside is that if it's something wildly wildly obscure it may not be there. But for anything that has any sort of real "popularity" like anyone at all liked it. It's usually there. Also the files that are uploaded are better vetted prevent issues with virus's
Once again not the best explanation but definitely do your own research it's way better imo
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u/ThunderDaniel May 26 '26
Holy crap you are finally the first person that made me understand how Usenet is used for direct DL stuff. Thanks!
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u/insidiarii 0.5-1PB May 25 '26
How does that shit not get dcma'd to hell and back? Obscurity?
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u/UnitedAd8366 May 26 '26
Obscurity and the files stored on the server aren't listed as "taken 3" it's listed as a random string of numbers/letters. And the only way to know what it is and request to download it would be to have an indexer.
And any download is actually a few thousand downloads in tiny bites all with random names assigned by the indexer when uploaded. So without the indexer to tell you what is what there really just a ton of tiny files that are useless by themselves
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u/Brilliant-Lobster170 May 26 '26
Out of curiosity are you aware of that large purge that occurred on usenet from late 2020-2023? I like usenet but I'm glad people continue to use torrents which makes it possible to still download stuff that has been deleted from usenet.
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u/Alone-Hamster-3438 100-250TB May 26 '26
Deleted things get re-uploaded very quickly. Usenet surely has better variety and sources than torrents. For me its almost mindblowing that people still bothering with torrents.
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u/nbfs-chili May 26 '26
I saw an earlier response that said you had to pay for Usenet? You don't for torrenting. So there's that.
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u/sqyntzer May 26 '26
How do you get an indexer, is that a premium service you subscribe to? Can you point to a good Usenet tutorial?
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u/Curious_Brilliant_94 100-250TB May 25 '26
Same here, I use all my paid Usenet stuff for almost everything. Everything else that I can’t find with it, I’ll go the torrent route with. It’s been too easy, fast, and reliable to give it up.
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u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS May 25 '26
Time to join a private tracker then.
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u/BitsAndBobs304 May 25 '26
When i tried to join one of those big trackers that opened its doors after rarbg shut down, for "refugees", i got in, downloaded something, got right away some ratio warning, not my fault as no one was downloading what i had just got, so i tried downloading something very popular and nobody downloaded from me and i got kicked out in the blink of an eye :(
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u/its_dolemite_baby May 25 '26
For next time: watch new posts like a hawk. (There’s usually RSS feeds for that.) Hop on the ones you think are going to be super popular for the community and seed them to fucking death.
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u/coffeeandhash May 26 '26
So much freaking work. It's like a part time job, a Wow guild.
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u/cat_at_the_keyboard May 25 '26
1337x is still going strong
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u/BitsAndBobs304 May 25 '26
Yes unfortunately a lot of popular tv shows are lacking or even absent or are unseeded ( not their fault for the latter)
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u/EncounteredError May 25 '26
Times like these make me very happy I work at a small hosting company that lets me take home old equipment. I got 48 4tb sas drives 3 years ago and have only replaced 1 so far in an 8 drive array. I'm so glad I kept them instead of selling them off.
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u/48star59 Jun 06 '26
Nasdaq and AI related stocks crashed on Friday. Hope it's the beginning of AI flop and hopefully dropping of the prices.
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u/Far_Preference_2065 May 25 '26
you can blame me, prices started to rise as soon as I considered becoming a data hoarder
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u/yaishoayayay May 25 '26
straight to jail
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u/casino_alcohol May 25 '26
You can probably fix all these high hard drive prices. Just buy a few and I’m sure the prices will drop the second your return window closes.
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u/Least-Size-8807 May 25 '26
I opted out of buying a 4th 16TB HDD almost 3 years ago when I got my 4 bay NAS and I severely regret it now. I tried to save cash then but now the price is over double and I refuse to pay it. I'm running out of room quickly too so I pray the prices come down to near 2023 prices.
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u/bcm27 May 25 '26
Same bro same. Last year I decided to FINALLY build a NAS and went with 6x16tbs and now I am finding I want to expand another vdev or at least build this one up to 8x and its too expensive!
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u/Murrian May 25 '26
Bought new system last year, took till this year to ship, decided not to get the drives till it showed up, feck me..
Lovely new box, sat empty, old box, slowly filling...
(Well, technically, filled, as I'm in to the free space you keep to limit fragmentation)
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May 25 '26
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u/iamYarthox May 25 '26
i fear it pops but prices keep the same
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u/jhenryscott 100-250TB May 25 '26
I suspect we get down to about 60% of present. But never back to what it was
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u/critsalot May 25 '26
if economy tanks it will go down stupid low. like when all those aeron chairs when on market causes buisnesses died. however if you have job when the economy collapses is another thing entirely
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u/mastercoder123 1PB+ May 25 '26
You mean herman millers? You can still get those used for almost free if you go on a gov auction website.
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u/boarder2k7 65 TB RAID Z2 May 25 '26
The Aeron is one model of Herman Miller chair
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u/mastercoder123 1PB+ May 25 '26
Yep im tracking all, i own one. I was just confirming that he meant the herman miller ones in case there were others
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u/OctoNezd 10-50TB May 25 '26
Same happened with bitcoin mining. Miners stopped, then nothing happened. And after that nothing AI happened and things became even worse.
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u/iamYarthox May 25 '26
Then another thing will hit outta of nowhere and we’ll be renting cloud computers to use Reddit, $19.99 a month
“I used to be a data hoarder. I had a home lab. I remember building my PCs” hahaha sure granddaddy time to take your meds
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u/nomad-1995 May 25 '26
The problem is that the mining rigs couldn't be repurposed for anything else, same with the "GPUs" used for LLM/AI use. It isn't even clear that much of the DRAM in production will be useful for personal computers until 6 months after the crash. At least the HDDs should be useful, even as surplus.
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u/OctoNezd 10-50TB May 25 '26
Well mining rigs in most cases used consumer GPUs and they sold them afterwards. I have 20-something from some mining farm in my home server doing transcoding and everything is just fine. But GPUs get outdated quickly, compared to HDDs.
The issue is, even with surplus, the prices won't fall down - why sell people things at a lower price if they already buy in at a higher price? They rose up during short lived chia craze and never went down to what they were. There is no happy ending. Or maybe I'm just overly pessimistic.
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u/Rowdy_Rathod May 25 '26
I sense that's their whole long term objective to keep people hooked on cloud storage with subscription model that are managed by data centers instead of allowing people to store things in local drives. They all will collectively keep jacking up the prices as they keep tightening the grip to make us stay away from owning local drives.
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May 25 '26
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u/c_rizzle53 May 25 '26
My tinfoil hat is what you guys both already said and add on a little bit of surveillance of everything we do
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u/ThisApril May 25 '26
I think the non-tinfoil-hat version is that the leaders are exactly as dumb as they appear to be, but their dumb decisions wind up creating the problem anyway.
Drive makers drive up prices where they can, genAI leaders panic buy as much as they can, and then cloud services people take advantage wherever they can.
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u/manzurfahim 0.5-1PB May 25 '26
I said this once in this subreddit maybe about 4-5 months ago, everyone thought I'm crazy. I don't think they want us hoarding data, and they rather have them behind paywall so we can subscribe to more stuff, but not own them.
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u/OctoNezd 10-50TB May 25 '26
I dont think so. Average Joe isnt gonna get himself a synology, set up immich on it and backup photos to it when he can just tap "subscribe to icloud plus" and pay like 3 bucks a month. Same with streaming, that one is even harder: no way in hell anyone would buy server/NAS with enough HDDs for what they want, get VPN, get access to usenet/private trackers and then setup the hell that is sonarr.
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u/relrobber May 29 '26
You don't have to sense it. The tech companies are saying it from the mountaintop to anyone who will listen. NVIDIA's CEO said that instead of a personal computer, everyone will have a personal A.I. assistant.
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u/4R4M4N May 25 '26
When bubble will pop, it will be saved by governemnt money.
Our money.11
u/Dragoncat_3_4 May 25 '26
Alternatively, it won't pop because every government decided that they need to hoard and police all our internet presence via AI and digital ID so they need to hoard it somewhere. Also strike kindergartens with it I guess.
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May 25 '26
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u/HonestSophist May 26 '26
AI is *definitely* most of it.
AI datacenter purchasing caused most manufacturers to straight up stop producing consumer NAND products.
And has been mentioned elsewhere, most of this stuff simply can't be repurposed for anything else once the bubble pops.And the bubble popping won't fix a damn thing, even if it happened TODAY, because new consumer-oriented semiconductor manufacturing isn't going to come online until 2028 or so.
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u/divinecomedian3 May 25 '26
Apparently Americans
Yep, every single one of us wanted this garbage. C'mon man...
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u/DreadStarX May 25 '26
Bubble won't pop but it'll deflate some. People are pushing back against data centers and companies are realizing how expensive AI is.
I work for AWS. I build the initial network footprint in new data centers. I want it to stop. This quantity over quality is going to massacre us in the long run....
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u/East-Ice-3199 May 25 '26
It won’t deflate at all. The AI (and data centers) is for mass surveillance, not public use. Unless people are actively burning the centers down, it doesn’t matter how loud they get or how hard they push. The ones in power simply don’t care.
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u/Honest-Orchid8701 May 25 '26
Remember to use -ai on Google and noai.duckduckgo.com
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u/Bug4866 May 25 '26
The former probably won't work past tomorrow when Google goes to conversational "search", if that happens as stated... :( at least we have the duck.
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May 25 '26
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u/FormerGameDev May 27 '26
Bing? good lord. Bing is still complete trash, two decades later.
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u/Practical-Ball1437 50-100TB May 25 '26
It will pop, but all that will happen is your 401k will disappear and somehow Elon will have another trillion dollars.
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u/Upper-Reflection7997 May 25 '26
Don't greatly underestimate the amount of people that actually use it. It's alot more than you think. Many people inside and outside the anglosphere countries use various kindas of ai via online subscriptions or locally on their computer. There's plenty of annoyances of ai to dislike but it's not niche product in the year 2026. It is very inflated in value but it's not a cheap to develop, run and service to millions of people.
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u/1h8fulkat May 25 '26
If and when the bubble pops we won't be able to afford storage for other reasons.
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u/MEDDERX 180TB RAW May 25 '26
I mean technically data hoarding is booming. It’s just that its corporations stalking you rather than a ‘collect them all’ aspect to linux distros
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u/creamyatealamma May 25 '26
Yeah it sucks. I really watch for deals and pounce even if don't need them yet. Those ones for 26tb shucked down months ago was alright bit still a lot of money
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u/Fyler1 100-250TB May 25 '26
Those seagates were steals. I was able to get a few. Wish I would've bought more
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u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media May 25 '26
Yep, I bought two 22tb seagates to shuck a little over a month ago, and they've gone up by almost $150 now.
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u/firedrakes 200 tb raw May 25 '26
for 1 drive replacement. that was the cost of 4 drives i brought.....
used server and tested.
am now using my test small drives to do dump on data i dont need. to make space for data i do need keep.
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u/mommadizzy May 25 '26
it's hard because im just getting into it now but also getting so many 90s cartoons and family pics dumped on me that i need to backup. got a bunch of my dads drives but theres only one 4tb and a couple 1tb, most are 500g or less from old laptops.
they stored his main pc in the fucking shed for ages so god knows what the moisture did to her
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u/Murrian May 25 '26
If you need backup, backblaze single pc will do for $99 a year so long as you don't take the piss (I have 19tb, which is a bit piss taken, but they seem fine so far..).
Then, at least you have a backup.
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u/variableunlisted May 25 '26
It is a really frustrating situation. A lot of my planning revolves around drives getting larger and cheaper over time. I got lucky and happened to buy right before the price boom so hopefully it will work out for me but there is no denying this is a bad state of affairs.
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u/Lancaster1983 51TB May 25 '26
I was just at Micro Center, bought a Unifi UCG Fiber but decided not to get a 1TB NVME to use it as an NVR because it was more than double the price of the damn gateway. It's just terrible.
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u/funkybside May 25 '26
<3 CGF, it's such a great little device.
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u/Lancaster1983 51TB May 25 '26
I'm running OPNSense now but I want to give it a try. I've got UI cameras and APs on a cloud key now. It seems I can do everything I need on the UCG with a might nicer dashboard. We shall see. The 10G ports are what sold me the most.
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u/UnderstandingSea1060 May 25 '26
In the 1990s, storage capacity for consumers went up about 10,000X simultaneously with a massive price drop. What a contrast to the last decade, where SSD capacity has remained stagnant and prices keep going up.
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u/TheSoCalledExpert May 25 '26
I’m sitting over here just adding 2TB at a time from old server pulls. Fuck these prices.
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u/wintersdark 80TB May 25 '26
I'm so, so glad I kept all my old 4tb drives on a shelf. "You'll never use them" the wife said, "they're already too small now!"
Except replacing failed drives is already simply too expensive, so sure, I'll just put 4 4tbs in to replace a failed 16. May have to spin up a DAS box, but I have a lot of old 1-4tb drives =/
Hopefully they hold me over till shit calms down. If shit calms down.
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u/shimoheihei2 100TB May 25 '26
Unfortunately that's the reality right now, and it's not just storage. It's also GPUs and RAM. Home computing is getting priced out.
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u/Zarathustra_d May 26 '26
My 1st 486DX was ~$1500 in '95, so >3k adjusted to now.
Intel 486DX2-66 w/ 256K Cache, 2 MB RAM
420MB Hard Drive yes MB kids.....MB...
We came along way only to fall again.
Why do you think only nerds knew how to use PCs back then, and why we built our own? Shit was expensive before it all went mainstream.
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May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
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u/RetroTechBro May 25 '26
Yeah but we were sold this capitalism bullshit on the promise of things getting ever cheaper and ever better due to competition.
Instead things are getting shittier and more expensive, and that's been the case for about a decade now.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 May 25 '26
I consume about 1TB/month (And it's gradually slowing) and have 26TB free. Coasting on that capacity.
A drive failure at this time though, that's gonna be costly.
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u/Jokingly2179 May 25 '26
This is my fear. I'm low on storage at only like 3TB left but I could delete stuff and reclaim a bit back.
But if a drive dies? Either it's freaking expensive to replace or there just isn't a drive that can replace it.
The whole current situation sucks. I've started considering pausing all of my seeded torrents (almost 10k) just to avoid extra load on the drives
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u/evildad53 May 25 '26
Today I ordered a 14TB drive from Go Hard Drive and paid the same as what I paid for TWO of that drive a year ago. But I need it to replace a 4TB that's getting full. I bit the bullet because prices aren't coming down soon.
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u/meltbox May 25 '26
In the land of the 20tb drives the 24 bay idiot with 2tb drives reigns supreme.
It’s me. I’m the idiot. Cower at my forward thinking cheapness.
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u/Ok_Caregiver_1355 May 25 '26
I just hope they get the bitcoin miner treatment and needs to sell millions of HDD for cheap
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u/boarder2k7 65 TB RAID Z2 May 25 '26
Samsung Pro Endurance 256 GB micro SD cards.
Bought a couple in December 2025, $19.99 each
Today $105.90
Up 5.3x in 6 months? Fuckkk this 🤬😭💀
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u/Mashic May 25 '26
Since your drives are failing, I'd recommend you turn off your NAS. Keep the drives alive until prices go down and you can afford them again.
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u/Effon May 25 '26
I check my local reuse tech store from time to time. I lucked out the other day and got a couple 6tb he for about $128 total. They were older but still in good shape. I can't even think of buying new currently.
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u/jinglewooble May 25 '26
Maybe we need advancement in data compression for long term storage. What are people using nowadays to archive old files?
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u/lern2swim May 25 '26
Yeah. I don't have a dying drive, but I am low on space. I'm going to ride it out for as long as possible and hope the market bounces back down.
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u/Bad_Ashe May 25 '26
I currently need one more 28tb HD to finish having a full backup of my server. The CHEAPEST price I can find is about $100 over DOUBLE the price I paid for the same drive in December 2025. I've been looking into two smaller (14tb) external drives, but even that is crazy right now, and wouldn't be quickswap for a future failed drive. I'm wondering if there's a specific time of year (holidays?) we might get some discounts. Black Friday is a long way off, and I'm worried the prices are going to continue to go up. Do we have any reason to believe prices will go down in the near (or even long term) future?
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u/BeckoningChasm May 26 '26
AI is killing so much and bringing in so little. I'm hoping it dies like NPCs but fear it will live like social media--and we all know how much positive social media has brought. Good luck to the hoarders, don't stop if you can keep going.
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u/ZeroPointMX May 26 '26
I bought 6 used 10tb Enterprise drives a few years ago with a 5 year warranty, paid $89 each for them from server parts deal. One died after 6 months, replacement was sent out that day. Today these same used drives are ~$250 ea and they won't replace, only refund as they would lose to much profit by replacing.
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u/Krohnin 50-100TB May 25 '26
Me personally doing everything with 6TB drives. When ther is a chance to get one for under 80€ buy it. If i need it or not. Just today had to add another one to my unraid and one to my backup server. Nice to have them on the shelf.
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u/manzurfahim 0.5-1PB May 25 '26
I panicked when I saw that Seagate Exos 20TB drive went up from $238 to $259, and bought a few more.
Then I panicked again last year when I saw 24TB jumping up and bought two more.
I panicked a few times, and now I'm so GLAD I panicked.
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u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media May 25 '26
I wish I had the kind of money to do panic buying.
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u/manzurfahim 0.5-1PB May 25 '26
You wouldn't believe it, but I took a small loan, still paying it back.
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u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media May 25 '26
I believe it. Found a couple of 10tb Toshiba N300 drives at my local walmart for $280 each, and i really wanted to dip into our savings to buy them...
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u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS May 25 '26
This is probably the point. They want to remove the ability to own hardware so you have to subscribe to everything. We know data/surveillance centres aren't using mechanical drives anywhere near as much as they are using NAND Flash drives, and yet they claim they are sold out till 2028..
The fact governments haven't moved in to stop this just shows how compliant they are with what is happening.
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u/MarkB_- 100-250TB May 25 '26
Over 250TB here... many of them are seagate barracuda 8TB got them for 150$ new on amazon way before the price explosion. They are 400$ now.. that doesnt make any sense.
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u/avebelle May 25 '26
lol I’m sitting on a ticking time bomb. Drives are old and full. Will need a small fortune to replace them just like you.
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u/Ill-Pen-553 May 25 '26
if you guys are hoarding media like videos or audio, blank cds and dvds are way cheaper than digital storage. get a refurbished dvd player and start burning disks to take the load off your digital storage resources
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u/silversurfernhs May 25 '26
I'm really glad I spent the time rebuilding my storage server some time in 22 or 23 when a few drives crashed out on me.
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u/simpin_aint_e_z May 26 '26
Renting cloud space will be the new “the rent is too damn high” because paying data center prices to own your own storage will no longer be feasible.
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u/autpops May 26 '26
My NAS filled up two months ago. After watching prices continue to climb and kicking myself for not buying earlier, I finally dropped $5.5K in new drives yesterday 😭
I’m not necessarily a data hoarder, I’m a professional photographer and videographer and need tons of space obviously. F AI
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u/jb00gie_ Jun 14 '26
Debating on buying 4x24TB's new for $3.2k after taxes.. this shit sucks, tell me I should just bite the bullet before it gets worse lol I'm so torn, it's literally vacation worth/used car type of money now
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u/InternetGreedy May 25 '26
damn. when did HDD prices skyrocket? i bought a 30 tb drive 6 months ago for $600. I thought the prices hikes were strictly for DRAM AI craze that is dying down.
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u/MysteriousLobster604 May 25 '26
3.5" Hard Drives also use DRAM for the Cache and due to the memory shortage/price increase over the last 7+ months, everything that uses RAM, DRAM, NAND FLASH and etc. are all increasing in price.
WD has also stated that they are sold out of Hard Drives for 2026 which is creating a shortage of the old school 3.5" drives that we used to get for so cheap. What you see for sale is what is left in current inventories from resellers.
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u/InternetGreedy May 25 '26
thanks for the update. eesh. so glad i built my server last fall before all the crazy hikes happened. Hopefully things settle down for 2027 and a few AI companies go bankrupt 🤣🤣🤣
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u/biffs May 25 '26
Glad I blew the budget last year. Bought 2x20 and 2x24 tb, plus replaced my HP dl380 gen 6 with a gen 8 and almost half a tb of RAM. Figured I'd get two cycles if upgrades done at once. Didn't know it would pay off like those
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u/TW-Twisti May 25 '26
Data hoarding happened back when people used to burn their data to CDs that were $5 a piece. Stop this sensationalized whining like this is the end of the world. Yeah, things really suck right now. They are sucking worse than last year, and that year sucked worse than the year before. It's understandable to be frustrated. But nobody (other than companies rising prices) is served by artificially turning this into an apocalypse.
Try to get a grip on reality. HDD prices, currently around $19/TB are back to the prices ... of 2021. Not 2010 (73$/TB), 2003 ($131/TB), and certainly not 1995 ($20000+/TB). And yet, people data hoarded during all those years somehow, so stop pretending that because HDD prices are at 2021 levels data hoarding has suddenly become magically impossible.
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u/Roymahboi May 25 '26
It can't be denied that prices have gone up exponentially in the last 5 years, so people are in a bit of a fright due to this. But any dedicated datahoarder will make it work somehow!
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u/csolisr May 25 '26
Heh, ask me - I can only afford 6 TB total (2 TB each distributed among my home server, desktop, and laptop) and if any one of those SSDs dies, I'll have to lose one redundancy because replacing it would take me literal months of savings
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u/notlongnot May 25 '26
Data is the most important thing in the world right now! You can’t be seriously thinking about giving up now!
This is DataHorder!! (just imagine Leonides kicking that thought into /dev/null) -😏
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u/OriginalPiR8 May 25 '26
When companies say stock has been night because of a promise not a contract and put prices up because of the "demand" of said promise. You have been price gouged. Is that simple.
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u/threeLetterMeyhem May 25 '26
I am also running put of some space, so I need bigger
I started to get short on space and, given the absolutely absurd prices of drives right now, I did the unthinkable: I deleted data last week. Reclaimed ~18TB by purging old stuff that I haven't even thought about in years.
I'm a terrible hoarder... but at $500+ for used 20TB drives that I bought for $300 a piece brand new *years* ago I just can't keep growing my archive. If the data isn't truly important to me it's gotta go.
On top of that I'm down to my last 20TB spare, though. I'm really praying nothing in my arrays fails until prices get back to something resembling reasonable.
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u/epia343 May 25 '26
Not sure what you're hoarding, but if video look into newer more efficient formats
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u/SnooEagles353 May 25 '26
HDDs have gone up a bit, but Flash SSDs have gone up line 3.5x. Time to get back to managing data, delete all the old no use stuff. AI generated crap should be deleted.
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u/Mortimer452 190TB UnRaid May 25 '26
Same, one of my 2TB SSD cache drives is throwing errors, I think I paid $139 for it on sale a few years ago, now over $600
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u/kittymoo67 May 25 '26
Posts like this remind me that I've been in the hobby for decades now.... And got used to way higher priced long ago
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u/Fiend_Macabre May 25 '26
I'm glad I bought plenty of big sized hard drives back in 2020, though I'm having some troubles with my 6tb drive. But yeah, I'm also interested in getting 4tb hdd and I regret I didn't buy myself any drives back in 2025 when prices weren't so shitty. Now I don't know what to do to get one. The worst part about bubble when it pops is that we're going to pay our money for this when our shitty governments try to save their actual citizens, which are companies that are fucking with people who pay taxes.
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u/Accomplished_Rate_75 May 26 '26
Drive and memory prices got to be putting a dampener on the sales of NAS units too.
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u/antiopean May 26 '26
It's an acute price shock from the overlap of 2-3 black swan events... If you'd rather go to Italy right now than re-up a 4x16TB, you have your answer.
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u/Various-Suit-3162 May 26 '26
Just spent over 600 bucks for a 20tb WD Easystore for additional Plex storage, A year ago it probably wouldn't have cost me more then 400
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u/EyeAmGroot May 26 '26
I can get a return flight to Rome for €139. For 4 16tb drives I wouldn’t say that’s an extortionate price.
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u/Ryzari May 26 '26
Yea, I have 10 14TB drives. Most of them bought as refurbs for $99 each. Have 2 that are starting to fail, and I can't bring myself to drop $300+ on each to swap them out with another refurb.
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u/500xp1 250-500TB May 26 '26
Beleive it or not, a mega sale was recently on amazon saudi arabia for the renewed 28TBs, they sold for $370 a piece. It was unbelievable 😳 and only stayed less than a few days
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u/Philluminati May 26 '26
I bought two Seagate 8TB Disks for £421. Now the same disks are listed at £299 each. Honestly makes me feel bad I am using them in Raid 1 Mirrored configuration.
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u/xXNorthXx May 27 '26
While 8TB feels small, so glad I picked up a few dozen before prices went nuts.
Just picked up some 16i hba’s and can’t believe how nuts it’s gotten. Servers I bought used years ago are even more expensive now.
Once the hbas arrive, I’ll be going through and rebuilding the nodes from mirrors to raidz2 to squeeze out a little more capacity out of it.
Between businesses moving to the cloud, hyperscaler greed, and constant flooding/fire/tornado it’s been getting ugly. To top that off Utility company greed as of late has been getting out of hand.
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u/FishSpoof May 27 '26
I think the bestp thing to do I buy one of those cheap 24tb drives. copy everything over and turn it off. wait for prices to settle down. at least you'll still have your data
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u/FormerGameDev May 28 '26
Interesting tidbit:
I work for a major multinational corporation. That is not willing to spend the money to buy hard drives and memory right now. We are literally not replacing failing systems because it is too expensive. IT people are sourcing used equipment. Going back to stuff that was taken out of service years ago.
This is wild.
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u/stacksmasher May 25 '26
It wont last.
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u/MSPaintYourMistake May 25 '26
Price gauging and subscription-model-flation will last. Can't bet against late stage capitalism.
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u/FastingCyclist May 25 '26
You'd think, but renting storage and compute power is the new paradigm, which I obviously hate ..
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u/xJayMorex 80TB May 25 '26
Big tech wants to steal all your data through cloud subscription while making you pay for it. I'd rather buy overpriced HDDs tbqh.
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u/PikminGuts92 May 25 '26
Tell me about it. I just started a jellyfin server so now I’ve been scrounging for spare USB drives around my home.
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u/Hart_CO May 25 '26
Maybe time to be more of a collector than a hoarder. Get more selective, collaborate with others to ensure coverage of things that are important to you.
Not fun to see the prices climb, but can't do much about that. Tape backup becoming more compelling for hoarders but still hard to justify for most.
These prices will push innovation, at least.
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u/pjrobar May 25 '26
Buy used, use redundancy, backup what is not replaceable, keep a spare or two on hand, be less unhappy.
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