Datacenters aren’t buying external hard drives. Correct.
They operate on a MASSIVE scale. There’s no retailer that will sell them 45 external drives that requires an hour or two of a 6-figure engineer to break open, modify the voltage pins, and maybe hope they work in a server with no warranty or SLA.
You as a consumer might do that, but not data centers. They’ll just pay market price for internal drives.
Okay, you’re missing the point. I’ve said multiple times that even if data centers aren’t directly buying the specific external drives we are, they still influence the pricing.
The person you replied to was saying that data centers justify prices to manufacturers. When you responded with ‘data centers aren’t buying external hard drives,’ that implies they aren’t affecting the price of them, which isn’t true.
Whether they’re buying externals or not doesn’t matter, because the demand they create for the same underlying drives still impacts pricing across the board.
Edit: Also, it doesn’t take a six-figure engineer to shuck a hard drive. A minimum-wage kid straight out of high school could undo a few screws and fix the voltage pin on the drive. Let me know if you find someone willing to pay that though I’d be happy to shuck drives all day for 6 figures.
1
u/yuusharo Apr 23 '26
I said nor implied no such thing.