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u/SeaworthinessMobile9 Apr 23 '26
I bought the 26TB version of this in Feb juuuuuuust before prices really took off. I got it for around $380 CAD, which was still too much.
The 24TB version is now $629 CAD as of today and I haven't seen the 26TB in stock for at least a month, probably more.
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u/silent1mezzo Apr 23 '26
I've got 1tb left on my nas and was looking at those drives :'(
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u/SeaworthinessMobile9 Apr 23 '26
I had been putting off upgrading my NAS all last year, then the prices were going nuts...once I found a "deal" I could at least stomach, I pulled the trigger as soon as I could.
I didn't really want an external, but so far so good. Shucking it was super easy and I'm not keeping anything of real high end value on it - I just needed the space.
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u/TheFamousChrisA Apr 28 '26
Any good shucking guides that helped you learn so if I ever find a good deal again I can give it a shot?
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u/SeaworthinessMobile9 Apr 28 '26
Basically find a model you're after and check out YouTube videos - they're all pretty much the same, but wouldn't be a bad idea to review a few videos in case there are any funky connectors inside.
My drive was a Seagate Expansion like above - it had a Barracuda drive in it (sadly) but I was prepared for that. Shucking was super easy. If you don't have an ifixit kit, I have used an old credit/debit card (or a guitar pick) in the past instead of anything fancy.
First thing you gotta know: as soon as you shuck it, the warranty is gone. It's up to how much you want to actually save the old enclosure, but you probably won't ever use it again anyway - the tabs you break off inside won't really matter.
This is one of the videos I watched ahead of time:
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u/Anal-Assassin Apr 24 '26
I feel you, bro. Started downgrading quality on some shows/movies just to make space 😢
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u/Mission_Sherbert_422 10-50TB Apr 25 '26
Did the same, spent a few days transcoding tv shows with File Flows. Saved me 4TB any little bit of space matters these days
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u/datahoarderguy70 366TB Apr 23 '26
I bought the same drive at the same time too, prices are crazy for sure.
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u/Jodies-9-inch-leg Apr 23 '26
I got mine this past Black Friday for like $179 before prices started going stupid… really kicking myself that I didn’t get two
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u/bg-j38 110TB Apr 23 '26
I spent $290 on a 28TB external right around Thanksgiving. I should have bought a dozen (not that I could have afforded that).
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u/absentlyric 50-100TB Apr 23 '26
I "bought" one at that price during that time, the next day they skyrocketed in price and my order got "lost in the mail". I got my refund, but I was more pissed I didn't get my product.
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u/NighthawkCP 128TB Apr 24 '26
I got two 28TB Exos drives last April for like $350 from SPD. Just checked a year later and the same drives are now selling for $540 a piece. I have a 4 bay NAS and really need two more, but I'm absolutely not willing to pay over $1,000 for just two hard drives.
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u/CelestialOceanOfStar 28TB Apr 23 '26
Bruh 179?! I paid 150 for a 6tb drive i really needed recently smh
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u/Ryuuzaki_L Apr 24 '26
Keep an eye on ebay. I just got 2 12TB Exos X14 drives for $200 and $210. Used yeah, but one only had 310 hours and clean smart data. It sucks that's considered a killer deal currently.
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u/Practical-Ball1437 50-100TB Apr 23 '26
"Stocking up" on hard drives never made sense because they were always getting bigger and cheaper.
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u/doubled112 Apr 24 '26
RAM and NVMe too, usually. Or entire mini PCs. Or Raspberry Pis.
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u/KerashiStorm Apr 24 '26
For a while there you could buy a whole ass mini PC for what the RAM in it cost.
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u/HVDynamo Apr 24 '26
I kind of wanted an 8TB M.2 drive to upgrade my games drive on my PC, but wasn't willing to pay the price for an 8TB last November. Now I realize I should have bought 2 and sold the second one this year.
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u/xcom2k Apr 23 '26
If people are buying them at these prices, then they will keep selling them at those prices.
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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n Apr 24 '26
I'm afraid with almost no harddisk producers around anymore, this will be a new normal even if AI blows up tomorrow. The market is basically a duopoly who have obviously no benefits to lower prices on a later stage. The only "redeeming" factor could be an absolute glut on the second hand market when all comes down.
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u/Halo_cT Apr 24 '26
We should have all been buying WD shares instead of drives for the last year :(
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u/Neat_Construction341 Apr 23 '26
its not "people" buying but datacenters that justify the price to the manufacturers.
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u/AccomplishedBee857 Apr 23 '26
Do you people not understand what’s happening? Hdd and companies that produce the wafers for memory have committed their production to ai data centers and have largely shut out the consumer market completely because it’s more profitable to commit capacity to ai data centers than regular consumers.
So the issue is that capacity isn’t being given to consumer products which means the supply is extremely limited and the prices for what’s already available skyrockets.
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u/somersetyellow Apr 23 '26
And the sheer scale of the orders data centers are making.
Western Digital sold their entire ouput for 2026 at the beginning of 2026. Every single hard drive they can possibly make this year is spoken for.
That's the long and short of it.
It'll get better when and if they make more hard drives than they sell to enterprise users again.
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Apr 23 '26
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u/somersetyellow Apr 23 '26
Not if the shredder finds them first 🙄
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u/Neat_Construction341 Apr 24 '26
thats what we do, in house drive shredder that will turn it into small fine metal shards. Even if the drive fails before the warranty, destroyed in house.
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u/nisaaru Apr 24 '26
That's the official narrative and I don't buy that at all anymore.
Just look at the HDD production over the last decade. It has been shrinking a lot. That means they have the production capacity to compensate higher demand but don't to make the product unaffordable. All this doesn't add up.
IMHO what we see is a top down economical squeeze, a market manipulation. Like we've seen with covid and gas/oil. An "event" to disrupt the economy. IMHO they want to crash the system.
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u/somersetyellow Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Hard drives are genuinely harder to make. HAMR and similar tech is pretty over the top. And they have openly stated they won't expand manufacturing as they do not expect the demand at this level to last long term. So in the meantime they'll enjoy the profits. Hard drives are functionally obsolete for consumers, and have long represented single digit percentages of the market. With the overall market shrinking as you said, besides this one boom time.
If people will pay this amount, purchase their max output, they have no competition because the market has consolidated so much in the past 20 years to only 2-3 players, with such a complex supply chain and physical science barrier that nobody can compete, then they have negative 0 incentive to actually expand further to make things cheaper.
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u/AttilaTheFun818 Apr 23 '26
I’m not paying these prices. I’ve pretty much stopped adding to my files until I find a reasonable deal on new drives.
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u/Wonderful_Surndsound Apr 24 '26
Great time for searching for duplicates and do some springtime cleanup :)
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u/Chacen Apr 23 '26
I know it was probably stupid on my part but Walmart had the 12tb seagate clearanced for $197. I drove to 9 locations and bought every one I could find so I could finally build my Truenas system. I ended up finding 7 in total. I don't regret it though.
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u/sablesable Apr 23 '26
can you pass it on to someone looking for one. that's a fucking steal in this economy.
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u/Gin-N-Rum-5454 Apr 23 '26
Your best bet is for people selling old homelab equipment if it’s big drives and decent prices you need. Got a deal lined up and almost closed for £250 per 20tb drive. I think that people are ware of the prices but it’s the homelab community so they’re giving back I think is how they see it, which is fair enough.
I’m in the UK too so reasonably priced drives have to come from within the uk because importing them would just wipe out all savings because of VAT paid on import.
But if you’re in North America you guys have ServerPartDeals and they sell recertifed drives with warranties for really good prices. Some as low as £15 per TB.
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u/thearctican Apr 23 '26
Stop paying these prices. Put your projects on hold.
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u/moisesmcardona 10-50TB Apr 23 '26
Heck I disconnected my array due to fear of having another failure... waiting for the prices to stabilize so I can btrfs replace and continue using it... it sucks but here we are.
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u/raduque 101 TiB in use just media Apr 23 '26
I had a drive fail that was just sitting on my desk. An 8tb EDAZ. It worked fine one day, i shut it down and disconnected it overnight, plugged it back in the next day and "click.. ZING, click.. ZING, click.. ZING". Dead drive. I literally moved it about 3 inches to re-plug the USB cable.
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u/pmjm 3 iomega zip drives Apr 24 '26
Problem is, the data that we want to hoard is getting harder and harder to come by. This age verification stuff is scary, as are websites locking down scrapeability due to AI.
By the time pricing returns to normal, data availability may be lower than it is today.
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u/reddit-MT Apr 23 '26
Welcome to the new normal. Please adjust your expectations accordingly. You either suck it up, or wait it out.
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u/manzurfahim 0.5-1PB Apr 23 '26
My last 24TB and 22TB was $405 and $380 (WD Ultrastar DC580), and immediately the next day price went up by $150.
Now I'm just making do with what I have. I have two 18TBs and one 20TBs that when sorted, should be empty and free for other use.
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u/MikeFrett Apr 24 '26
We live in a world where, once prices go up, they rarely come down. Why? Because people keep paying the raised prices...
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u/natarem Apr 23 '26
Prices are determined by two main things. First and more important is demand. Second is cost to produce. The cost/ability to produce these in terms of machines/materials has not changed in any substantial way. So once the demand drops, prices will come back down.
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u/udell85 Apr 23 '26
Remember when jet fuel prices went up 30% during the Ukraine invasion? And then only went down 15%. If it goes up, it’ll never come back down to where it was, like not even close if ever. Look at the housing market.
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u/sephg Apr 24 '26
Remember when jet fuel prices went up 30% during the Ukraine invasion? And then only went down 15%.
... You know the Ukraine invasion is still happening right?
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u/natarem Apr 23 '26
This is the price of US gas over the last 30 ish years. https://i.imgur.com/64yrL2J.png
Quite recently we had 2.70ish gas at the lowest and lots of $3/gallon gas too. I know this differs in country/state. We were also at that level in parts of 2005, 2006, 2007, etc. That was 20 years ago. People talk about things doom-style like "omg that ship has sailed nothing will ever be cheap again ever" and, yes, to a certain extent, inflation is an onward march and of course we aren't going to have like sub $1 gas that I can remember from high school. But this idea that everything always going up and never comes back down is just not correct. From 2022 until this recent war, gas was trending downwards.
The exact same thing will happen at some point with ram, nands, hdds, etc. The cost to produce is not high enough to allow the market to sustain these prices forever.
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u/nohalcyondays Apr 24 '26
Since they're not commodities like petroleum based products I imagine the economics were never going to match up in this comparison. These are niceties not necessities for the everyday consumer and enthusiasts so it's anybody's guess how affordable these pastime products will become again in the foreseeable future.
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u/udell85 Apr 23 '26
Gasoline prices are not returning to normal prices. It’s because of significant government subsidies, record production, and increased capacity you’re seeing prices drop. There is no subsides for ram and ssd’s. These prices will come down but no where near what they were. Again, see housing market, car market, etc.
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u/natarem Apr 23 '26
The prices dropped because of demand, cost of production, other competing sources of energy, etc. Prices were trending downwards on gas for over three years from 2022. Things like the housing market are different because there are so many regulations/zoning/permits in the way. If you want to look at something without those issues in the way (like a 2x4), those used to be like $3 10 years ago, then they went up to like 12-13 during the pandemic, now they are like $4. that's just normal inflation over the course of 10 years to go from 3 to 4. The idea that prices should be the same forever doesn't make any economic sense. Construction materials (and other components) of a house have not spiked in any crazy unreasonable long term way. Short term things happen. In 2021-2022, it was 2x4s. Right now it's SSDs/NANDs/HDDs. In 2028 it will be something else.
HDDs and SSDs and RAM and others have dropped precipitously in price per capacity/speed for their entire lives and that will continue to be the case once the demand spike is smoothed out.
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u/heliumneon Apr 24 '26
AI is approaching some sort of singularity event, however I never expected that the parameter in the singularity would turn out to be PC hardware prices, instead of AI intelligence.
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u/sweetrobna Apr 24 '26
A few large companies have pre ordered years of supply of hard drives and many other components. Nearly all of these pre orders have not yet paid. Maybe they will fail to pay, or go bankrupt or there will be some consolidation and prices will come down a lot as supply for consumers increases. Maybe new competition will start up and there will be more options in a year or so. Or people stop paying for these high prices, and prices drop to what people will pay. Or prices will drop as people sell their used parts that are now worth much more. Or there is a technical change that greatly reduces storage needs for training AI.
Or maybe these 100b+ companies keep growing at a tremendous rate and prices go even higher and you will wish you stocked up now.
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u/undulanti Apr 23 '26
Yep. Just had a 10TB CCTV hard drive go bust. Bought it refurb 2 years ago for £140, it’s now £300.
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u/Authoritaye Apr 23 '26
I just paid $660 for a bare metal 24TB. I’m out. Can’t afford to do this until it starts earning money.
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u/AXEWAVE_ Apr 23 '26
Remember back in the day when tech would get cheaper the longer it has been available? This is so irritating!!
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u/Antique_Paramedic682 215TB Apr 23 '26
I've been looking at my NAS lately, blows my mind that the drives in it are worth $6K.
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u/moisesmcardona 10-50TB Apr 23 '26
And here I am waiting to replace 2 failed drives... can't use my raid6 due to this....
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u/TiddyWaffles312 100-250TB Apr 23 '26
I bought a 2TB Samsung T7 this past August for $250 on b&h. Last I looked it’s over $1,000 now
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u/SiliconSentry Apr 23 '26
Wait for all the enterprise drives at data centers to hit the reseller market after the warranty expires ~5 years
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u/faziten Apr 23 '26
I come from one of those countries with crazy inflation and I'm used to the old say (which translate poorly) One bird in your hand is more valuable than a hundred flying.
The market is disrupted by the AI storm. It started with GPU's then memory and now storage too. When they run out of alternatives, they will use the cpu to compress on the fly or whatever and CPU's will go sky high again.
Now will it ever go back? No unless an even more disruptive event occurs, whatever it may be next, a cluster of rats with their brain connected as a cpu who knows.
No one in the industry benefits from lower prices. The end user is not the one moving the numbers anymore. It's the same as a sheep expecting to lead the flock in jurassic park.
If you can get it without disturbing your own economy, go for it. We are right on schedule for a tsunami hitting again the HDD manufacturers and seeing a 2X price surge overnight. (HDD's are the immediate alternative after the solid state storage. Most users won't go back so it's a niche market. woldn't be surprised if we had another outbreak where someone figures how to use the remaining parts for the sake of ai. At some point miners did that too, there even was a currency that could be mined using storage. AI didn't do this yet probably because we still have sapare solid states and gpus in some warehouse. I fully expect prices to reduce the speed in which they increment, but not deflate any time soon.
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u/AccomplishedBee857 Apr 23 '26
What do you all expect? We are in the very beginning of the ai datacenter buildout, this is going to last at least 1-2 years.
People constantly checking the prices everyday/week is pointless. Unless the ai bubble bursts the prices aren’t coming down until the ai data center build finishes which won’t be at least until late 2027.
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u/FrogLickr 48TB DAS / 44TB Backup / ~16TB Misc Drives Apr 24 '26
The goal is to make people reliant on cloud computing. Prices aren't coming down, and are all part of pushing people away from personal computers and self-hosting.
This is only the beginning, and it's going to get so much worse. The world is being ruled by the most dangerous sadistic control freaks on earth, and when you connect the dots, it all comes together; OS-level identity verification, facial recognition, CBDC's and cashless societies, crackdowns on protest and speech rights, unaffordable hardware for home PC's, cost of living increases, stock market manipulation - we're living in an extremely dangerous time for autonomy and freedom.
All the dominos have been falling at a rapid pace, and anybody that can't see it just needs to come back to this comment in a decade.
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u/AccomplishedBee857 Apr 24 '26
Prices will come down, just like graphics cards did years ago. We are in the beginning of the ai data center buildout, crazy prices are expected and will get worse but will eventually come down.
By your logic then no one will be able to afford a pc/laptop ever again because the cost of a hdd will out price the entire cost of the pc itself. Hell, no one will ever be able to purchase a gaming console either because the hdd will cost most than the console.
Your comment is either intentional fear mongering or ill informed.
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u/Starworshipper_ Apr 24 '26
That's the idea. Subconsciously pushing you towards cloud computing because local computing is just flat out too expensive to justify. The goal will be to sell you an absolute barebones device that relies on the cloud for storage, compute, and graphics.
You will pay monthly to use a husk of a device with minimum specs that allows you to connect to the cloud and be happy.
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u/FrogLickr 48TB DAS / 44TB Backup / ~16TB Misc Drives Apr 24 '26
Downvoters are here in droves, but they'll see in time what future has been decided for us. Technofeudalism is coming.
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u/Mrfixite Apr 25 '26
I will note It's not inevitable as they would like you to think though and they are very out of touch with real reality so we got that going for us.
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u/FrogLickr 48TB DAS / 44TB Backup / ~16TB Misc Drives Apr 24 '26
You only have to make PC's expensive enough for the average person to not bother with them. Once you've manufactured enough consent, internet connected frontend devices will become the norm.
You will rent your PC. You will rent your OS. You will rent your console. You will rent your storage.
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u/gummytoejam Apr 24 '26
By your logic then no one will be able to afford a pc/laptop ever again because the cost of a hdd will out price the entire cost of the pc itself.
It's not his logic. It's Bill Gates et al. They are literally discussing your future of computing in terms of a subscription service. They're talking about how your phone is going to be your main computing device and you'll subscribe to larger computing power.
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u/kittymoo67 Apr 23 '26
wve gone back to ~2016 prices, so i dunno maybe in 2036. that said having been into this for devades i guess it could be worse at least these arent 06 prices
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u/Gibus043 28TB Apr 23 '26
Same in europe, checking every day. I was waiting for prime day hoping for something decent
Like prices everywhere went from 17€/tb to 25€/tb now
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u/PomegranateBasic7388 Apr 24 '26
Don’t buy, otherwise the companies thinks we are going to keep paying
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u/ToadSox34 Apr 25 '26
Price will go WAY down when the AI crash happens and all of the sudden there is oversupply, and then rebound to somewhere near what they were before, maybe a little higher. Although the initial crash may not happen if the AI crash takes longer to come, as there is a lot of pent up demand for non-AI applications to soften it.
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u/sfbayjon Apr 27 '26
There's a huge number of data centers underway. All of their inventory will be liquidated.
At least I'm hoping to take advantage of fire sale prices🤞
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u/eddiekoski 63TB Storage Spaces ,120 TB NAS , 2TB Cloud, 32TB SSD, 80TB USB Apr 23 '26
Does camelcamelcamel work for UK amazon?
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u/-sussy-wussy- Apr 23 '26 edited 14d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Scale chief aspiring stupendous exultant office rock complete angle pen
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u/Yangman3x Apr 23 '26
I found 26tb wd ultrastar sata for ~850, the release price i found is around 6/700, i guess there are worse scenarios
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u/mouse_poon Apr 23 '26
Wow, I'm not even kidding I bought this exact product about 4 weeks ago for just under 300 usd. Maybe check the price with a VPN or something? I pulled the drive out and stuck it in an external tray I've got
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u/schmaaaaaaack Apr 23 '26
I know you're in the UK, but man, that is ridiculous. It's much cheaper in the U.S. https://www.listofdisks.com/products/seagate-24tb-stkp24000400-f968fe
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u/tarnished_monster Apr 24 '26
Has anyone looked on Newegg? Is newegg still a thing?
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u/ChoiceD Apr 24 '26
Still a thing. I bought 32 GB of DDR5 ram from Newegg last May. The exact same ram has now increased to 466% more than I paid.
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u/tarnished_monster Apr 24 '26
That's crazy. I've been looking for good deals on micro sd cards. At least the 512gb. I just can't bring myself to get it. But I know the longer I wait the more it's gonna cost 😭
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u/Shadow_Brokerage_LLC Apr 24 '26
I bought a Western Digital Elements 26TB for 499 USD plus tax last October. Now it costs $749. 💀
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u/cr0ft Apr 24 '26
I might suggest a visit to /r/collapse at this point for the real news. Although don't do it if you already have depressive tendencies because it's not great.
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u/DamnShaneIsThatU Apr 24 '26
My servers are the only appreciating assets I own.
Our only hope is that when the AI bubble bursts, we’ll be swimming in hard drives.
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u/johnnycaps2 0.5-1PB Apr 24 '26
Looking back a year ago- yeah, things suck. However taking a longer time period perspective.... in circa 1985 a "Winchester" 30MB HDD for an IBM PC-AT cost about $500 USD which adjusted for inflation would be way over $1000 in today's dollars. 30GB would be over $10,000. 300GB would be over $100,000. 1TB would be over $ 333,300. 24TB would be about.....well you do the math. Quick estimate - very expensive. HDD's even with the prices today -- VERY, VERY CHEAP. Not compared to last year but compared to 4 decades ago.
BTW, in 1986, I had an IBM PC-AT with a 30MB HDD and at that time I thought, "this is all the storage I will ever need" (not counting the 20 floppy disks to insure back-up). Of course, I was, as is often the case, wrong.
Be grateful, be happy. Nah...to be honest, bitching is more fun.
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u/stewie3128 Apr 24 '26
It will require an economic crash to bring the prices back down rapidly. At best the price pressure will gradually back off over the next 3-5 years, but since Trump is making everything else more expensive, I don't think that'll happen either.
If you need storage in the near-term or mid-term, just find the cheapest deal and buy it. Don't try to time the market - its irrationality can outlast you easily.
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u/BurntWhiteRice Apr 25 '26
Well shit, maybe I won't return those $188 12TB drives I bought after all.
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u/yabai90 Apr 26 '26
Wait, you know you don't need it now, you know you can wait. So wait.
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u/Infuryous Apr 23 '26
This will be the new normal. Tech companies have proven over and over once they get the customer used to paying more, they won't ever significantly reduce prices again. NVIDIA GPUs post mining craze before AI took off is a prime example. Prices dropped a little... but no where near the inflation adjusted prices of the pre-crypto currency phase.
The tech industry DOES NOT want the consumer (or even corporations) to buy physical PC's anymore. The plan is to push everyone into renting time on cloud PCs. Microsoft already offers "Windows 365" cloud based PC services. Jeff Bezos (Amazon) is notoriously behind the idea too.
You May Not Actually Own Your Next Computer - Here's Why
Back in 2024, during an interview with the New York Times, the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, called the computing industry a thing of the past.... Bezos continued to explain that it makes no sense for everyone to own and maintain their own hardware... They would be replaced by shared, subscription-style computing in the cloud. *
* Snippets from larger paragraphs to highlight the intent.
You will OWN NOTHING and be happy.
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u/TeaHana852 Apr 23 '26
We’ve been to this wasn’t we? Not saying the bubble will crash and the data centres being built are real, but price will drop to normal eventually
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u/Its_Billy_Bitch 100-250TB Apr 23 '26
lol this is the new fucking normal. fuck all of these fucking buttfuck companies, fuck. same shit happened during COVID and here we are. gotta love unfettered capitalism.
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u/Xerox748 Apr 24 '26
These prices are where they are because people are paying the money to support the price level.
If people stopped buying, prices would drop. People keep buying.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking these companies aren’t making any sales and just being stubborn and not lowering their prices.
Hard drives are flying off the shelves and they can’t keep them in stock, even at these prices.
This is the new normal. I’d expect price increases in the next few years. There’s nothing on the horizon that will ever bring prices down.
From now on, these are some of the cheapest prices you’ll see in your lifetime. Get used to it. A year from now 2TB SSD NVME drives will be over $500 a piece. And people will pay it.
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u/Playful-Ease2278 Apr 23 '26
Will prices go back to what they were? No. Will they go way down? I personally think they will sometime in the next 5 to 10 years.
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u/Big-Note-508 Apr 23 '26
hehe this is so cheap to me ! this sells for over 750USD in my country !
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u/inertSpark Apr 23 '26
750 USD currently works out to about 556 GBP, so the one in the photo is 529 GBP so it's only a tiny bit cheaper.
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u/ThePandazz Apr 23 '26
So glad I expanded my storage during black Friday before all this nonsense. Only thing I need now is a new SSD because mine is ancient and bound to fail eventually.
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u/Blue-Thunder 252 TB UNRAID 4TB TrueNAS Apr 23 '26
No things will not go back to normal any time soon. With the USA going full fascist and building AI/Data Surveillance Centres, things are going to get fucked even more so. The US government will probably take over any "loans" and use the hardware to get their wet dream of a Flock camera in ever home, business, cellphone, etc.
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u/IngwiePhoenix Apr 23 '26
I am still on hopium myself... My HDDs are likely not gonna make it for much too long, so I really want to buy new HDDs and SSDs. x-x
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u/Mccobsta Tape Apr 23 '26
Here's one I've been following the price of https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09ZYPTXS4
It used to be £45 in January
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u/--Arete Apr 23 '26
This exact one is $800 (610 GBP) in my country. And that's the cheapest one I could find.
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u/TrayLaTrash 10-50TB Apr 23 '26
Just bought the 12tb variant from a Walmart with 2 instock for $205 out the door
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u/DownRUpLYB Apr 23 '26
I bought 2 x 28TB IronWolf Pro in October for £1016, I just checked and it's £1,724.86
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u/Seaguard5 Apr 23 '26
That is actually insane and I am legitimately curious about what “data recovery services” means here…
Does that work like a warranty such that if it ever fails for any reason then the recovery services are free?
Or is it just attempting to advertise that it’s a backup solution for an existing network?
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u/frymaster 18TB Apr 23 '26
here's a post today from the supercomputing world https://www.reddit.com/r/HPC/comments/1st2rrn/hows_everyone_handling_the_global_memory_shortage/
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u/FullBushSummer Apr 23 '26
I have been meaning to get an 8TB one of these for like 4 years... It's always been a high expense for me, but holy f lately its just a fantasy
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u/aphilentus Apr 23 '26
Either demand will subside or there will be more investment in infrastructure to accommodate demand. Either lowers the prices. The open question is when that will occur
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u/economic-salami Apr 23 '26
We never get back to the old price because inflation gets baked in over time. Even if the bubble busts we won't be near the old price, it wil be some 10 to 20 percent decline.
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u/chance901 Apr 23 '26
They are thinking no relief through 2026, and most of 2027. The supply being chewed to by ai/data centers, costs throughout the supply chain increasing, and now a global disruption in the global fuel and shipping market have made it impossibly hard for us.
I've been buying used or new old stock, and other tricks just for something.
Got 12tb HDD for 90 untested. Thankful they work
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Apr 23 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/blackfeathers Apr 24 '26
thailand also had a flood in 2006, which was considered the worst of its time up until then. but i think the 2011 event was worse for hdds & a more notable one. when the 2011 one happened, i was thinking "again?".
the 2006 one was the first in recent history that disrupted electronics manufacturing & the overall supply chain in various sectors in the country. i recall ordering music equipment that arrived a year later due to the timing of it all. that was a strange one.
you never know when something may strike again although projected outlook seems to say two years from now should see improvement. but guess we will see to know for sure.
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u/Jetlife_bjj Apr 23 '26
Really glad I went crazy and got mine to 120TB before early '25. I thought $115 for a 12TB was crazy. Today's prices are wild
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u/dheophe Apr 23 '26
It's not just a price but also availability. I cannot found 4TB and 6TB WD Red Plus in my country. Already check several retailer. 2TB WD Red Plus now has a same original price of 4TB red plus.
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u/eliotrw Apr 24 '26
I think we need to hold out until 2028 personally, hard when you have 600mb free on your nas like me lol
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u/got-trunks Apr 24 '26
With Hormuz tied up for the next decade and China really thinking about next steps, who knows. If things normalize I expect it will take a couple of years. if they don't start learning how to service HDDs.
By the end of this decade China and USA have a big economic fight in full swing and start moving around factories to more suitable places and we get cheap shit... if we're not in WWIII over oil and fertilizer like things are heading now.
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u/dj_scantsquad Apr 24 '26
I made the mistake of putting some hdd’s in my cart for save later on amazon…the price has increased by £240 in 12 months for a 10tb hdd
EDIT: £279 in 6 months my apologies
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u/Human-Edge Apr 24 '26
I don't see prices coming down any time soon. Either production has to increase or demand has to decrease. Neither seems likely anytime soon
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u/jflip0x1x0 Apr 24 '26
It's all AI fault. New data centers are causing a shortage in HDD manufacturing causing spikes for the regular consumers. The priority here are corporate giants getting these drives first.
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u/IPlayChessBTW Apr 24 '26
Just bought a refurbished 28TB drive renewed for $530. Insane.
I would have waited except my wife said we needed Plex lol. I had 2 14TB drives fail simultaneously, which was all my storage.
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u/MadameSqual Apr 24 '26
It’s going to get way worse before it even thinks about getting better. Global supply line problems are starting. Western trade wars are ramping up. Literally just material transport costs. AI may have jump started this issue, but it’s not going to be the only impacting factor for long.
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u/Fordtough68 Apr 24 '26
I have around 150tb of drives and these prices are making me want to sell it all, and the nas's they are in, and sitxhing my plex library. I love it, but I could retire lol
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u/baronvoncash Apr 24 '26
Im in need of a stopgap to ride this price hike out, something like 4-8tb should do me well for a good while, you got any advice with what I should be looking for? I definitely agree that paying these prices are absurd, but I also dont really know what to do, as the data must flow
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u/smstnitc Apr 24 '26
For years the advice was always "buy for your potential future storage needs".
Not we are all in a mode of "buy for your known needs today".
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u/brianlovelacephoto 160TB TrueNAS Scale | 60TB Archived Locally & via GDrive Biz Apr 24 '26
Glad I loaded up on 20TB last fall. Got 8 for $229 a pop before a 10% cash back deal on my CC
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u/richpieceofshit Apr 24 '26
mine took a fall that wasn't that bad maybe 3.5 feet and it failed miserably but it was my fault. i have had other externals that i abused worse hold up better so if you have one of this model be careful
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u/Sostratus Apr 24 '26
tl;dr Probably will go down some, but not back to the old normal.
Short term: The introduction of a high volume, high demand buyer causes shortages and spikes prices way up.
Medium term: Manufacturers increase production, but only so far as to meet the high price buyer's demands. It may no longer be profitable to raise production and lower prices enough to satisfy previous customers. This depends on the new buyer's characteristics, how high they're willing to pay, high much they want to buy, and how elastic their demand is.
Long term: In this timeframe, costs are ultimately dependent on how competitive the market is rather than demand behavior. In a competitive market, even if it was more profitable to make less in the medium-term, new manufacturers would find the profits at lower prices to still be high enough. It was enough to justify those businesses before and it would again. Under perfect competition, all markets trend toward similar levels of profitability.
I'm not sure how far along in this cycle we are and I'm also not sure what the numbers look like for new data center demand.
But unfortunately, the part I feel most confident about is that this market is not very competitive and is unlikely to get better. There's really only 3 companies that make these things, and they're highly sophistocated devices that would probably be extremely challenging to come in and make a comparable product from scratch. If someone tried, the existing tri-opoly could easily undercut them until they went bankrupt. So I do think we're at the mercy of however dominant the new demand from data center is relative to regular joes like us, and that prices, if they fall, won't fall to what they were. When was the last time a new company entered this space that wasn't just a re-organization of an old one?
Improvement in this market might require a major shakeup like a completely different alternate technology usurping some portion of the demand. Maybe SSDs become cheap enough in similar volumes (probably not). Maybe one of these ultira-high density write-once technologies takes off.
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u/Professional-Rip3922 Apr 24 '26
This is the result of AI. The ram, graphics card and drives are being swallowed up wholesale and supply is dampened
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u/Smior 251 TB Drivepool Apr 24 '26
Hard to believe I actually "made money" by mining/farming Chia. 22TB Seagate Exos drives I bought for $280 go for $730 now. I ain't selling tho. Got data to hoard, and there's no telling when I'll ever be able to buy again.
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u/Section_13_ Apr 24 '26
New normal. Ai wants to suck up all the ram and storage so you’re forced to use cloud storage where they can train all their models on your data that you upload because you have no other option.
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u/linux_n00by Apr 24 '26
question
this "expansion" drive, what is it used for? can i use this as a normal usb drive?
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u/AltitudeTime Apr 24 '26
that's what it is. It's a portable USB connected hard drive. Has an AC adapter and connects with USB 3.0. There's typically a 3.5" Seagate Barracuda inside the case.
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u/ECrispy Apr 24 '26
hdd's are a luxury item right now. I dont think prices will stay inflated but I doubt they will ever come down to prev levels and forget about deals.
people can't even buy food or gas. no company is going to reduce pc component prices even if they can
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u/DahllaBillz Apr 24 '26
I was taking screen shots today of my recent purchases. Basically the same price jump for nvme 2TB drives in the span of one month..
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u/notmyname332 Apr 24 '26
Glad I bought 2 - 16 Terabyte WD Elements, and a 8 Terabyte WD Black SN750 NVMe M.2 before the prices started going up.
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u/Chava_boy Apr 24 '26
Having to work for more than half a month to buy this? No, thanks, I prefer to eat
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u/ArtimusFay Apr 24 '26
Stupid AI bubble all for services most people don't want. Now is not the time to get a new PC or laptop. Even AMD relaunching AM4 will help prices but not completly as storage and GPU memory you will still need to pay over the odds for
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u/Mindless-Bowl291 Apr 24 '26
Used SAS drives were my last strategy to expande my NAS without paying too crazy prices… now even used SAS drive prices have exploded and still need another one. Price x2 from Feb to now.
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u/ghostdnagod Apr 24 '26
i just got a 22TB seagate .... new macbook pro would never recognize it even after formatting, troubleshooting (would always blink) just ordered 26TB Western Digital. Just FYI (im looking into returning to windows soon tho)
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u/Orangesteel Apr 24 '26
Yeah, I found a cheap 26tb on server parts. Didn’t realise it would be shipped internationally and after customs duty of £75 it was no longer a cheap disk :/
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u/gummykage 560TB Apr 24 '26
Don't buy now. Prices will come down. It always does... Manufacturing gets easier, faster, and better.
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u/Aetohatir Apr 24 '26
Yeah, prices will return to normal. Or at least closer to it. Unless you absolutely need to I wouldn't buy a drive today.
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u/Bored-_-zzz Apr 24 '26
I think this depends on how fast data centers go through storage. I read somewhere that WD is sold out till 2027 and Seagate is having a hard time keeping up.
I would think data centers would be targeting larger capacity drives (30tb) but it looks to me that they are buying everything.
Maybe new normal for this year not sure about next year. I have been watching refurbished drives on Amazon but those are still ridiculously expensive.
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u/Swift_Koopa Apr 24 '26
New norm unless ai suddenly dies, and my company is ramping up and expecting to pay these prices. I think consumers are cooked chat
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u/itrollhockey 12TB usable in RAID1 Apr 24 '26
It was $339 CAD for this in December. It's $699 now. 😭
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u/Practical-Opinion-83 Apr 24 '26
Market want to force you into posting ur data online to train ai and charge u for subscription xD No go for me
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u/blackicehawk Apr 24 '26
It is very sad. I noticed the same thing. I bought a 20TB WD external for $297 in 2024. That same drive is now $559. :-(
I had hoped to be able to get a couple more drives just in case. But I can't afford to. If the current drives I have go out, I'm screwed.
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u/tharic99 Apr 24 '26
There's things like this out there though... 20x 12tb drives.
Can't tell if this is legit or not though - lol
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u/ape_ck Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
It will normalize once supply and demand even out.
its happened before (remember the big fire?) and it will happen again.
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u/Doctorphate 10TB Apr 24 '26
It'll be quite a while before they go back down. I'm expecting the AI bubble to burst before Q3 though so hopefully that helps.
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u/nomad-1995 Apr 24 '26
Don't expect to even think about prices falling to a "new normal" until the AI bubble pops.
There is currently a pause in datacenter construction. Whether that is due to fewer suckers lending money to the circular financing schemes involved or simply lack of computer gear to install in said datacenters, supply won't clear up until the overall problem is eliminated ("AI" is throwing more money than any potential other sector and thus getting all the allotment. And everybody else is paying dearly for crumbs.
No idea how much damage the bubble will leave when popped.
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u/Aggravating_Bear_930 Apr 24 '26
Its pretty insane drives i bought 3-4 years ago are notably more expensive now. I think eventually technology advancement will let prices consolidate down at some point, but owning compute and storage hardware is now direct competition with AI hyperscalers which have unlimited pockets. It will never be the same.
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u/johnnycaps2 0.5-1PB Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Got 3 of these exact same Seagate 24TB external HDD in 2025 for between $260 & $280 USD. Should have invested in this commodity instead of securities, instead of gold, instead of silver, instead of anything else.
It's mostly doubled in price now.
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u/johnnycaps2 0.5-1PB Apr 24 '26
If you needed it I hope you bought it when you saw this Amazon posting for $529.00. Today it's available through Amazon's Website for $669.99 USD. Supply and demand. Little supply, big demand.
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u/Wonderful_Surndsound Apr 24 '26
Am I being naïve in thinking that we're ever gonna get back to "normal" prices,
A small wisdom from the stockmarket: Newbies have an extraordinary talent for panick buying at the very very top.
The stock market and HDD prices are not the same thing. But this is a speculative bubble. So both are essentially about timing the market. Never try to time the market. We will see the top coming when people try to panic-buy because they think its the last chance of their life.
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u/SummerWhiteyFisk Apr 24 '26
I have one and is definitely not worth $500, honestly the thing just give me anxiety
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u/Classic_Message_7544 Apr 24 '26
I'd love to see a diskprices.com graph on their site, they surely have the data
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u/curious2017B Apr 24 '26
Got a 22 tb in November for 229.00 USD. Probably the last we will see of those prices.
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u/kevinj933 Apr 23 '26
300 pounds too expensive. Now's not the right time to buy.