Wild how memory and storage have only ever gone down in price since they were invented, and now they're gonna go up like it's the 80's and 90's again.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Motherfuckers.
It took a lot in me not to brag about my luck with buying used HHDs for home use.
Not to be 'that guy', but with how things are trending I feel like now is the time to make your homelab if you want one and haven't taken the dive already.
Seems like there's a growing chorus of tech CEOs affirming plans to transition consumers to cloud-based personal computing - component prices probably wont be bouncing back anytime soon.
Least year I paid $485 cdn for 22 tb wd red pro drives. Right now the same drives are $749 cdn.
It's already too late
Yea, I mean it's definitely already pretty bad, but I just don't think it's coming back down - at least not soon.
If you can afford it still, I wouldn't wait.
I purchased two 12 TB HDDs last year when they were on sale and wow am I glad I did so. I joked how they'd last us the rest of our lives and now that might have to be true.
Took same action. Can't have an up-to-spec homelab unfortunately, but got a good storage upgrade.
I went to buy used drives for an offsite backup and the prices were double what I paid a year ago, so no, now is not the time, unfortunately.
Yup, they are definitely already inflated, but I wouldn't wait for them to come back down - i'm not sure they will.
if you need HDD, i never had a problem with seagate, though it's been years since i bought one
it would not surprise me if a news breaks out soon that they've reached similar deals with the other major brands.
me neither. if you think you might need more storage over the next 2 years, now's the time to get it
I just picked up 40tb for exactly this reason. I was already considering an upgrade, but was planning like 16 tb. But with this news… Might as well get it while I can at prices I was expecting to pay anyway, even if it’s more than I really had budgeted for it..
(I got refurbished drives, with 3 yr warranty, so this wasn’t like several grand with no protection or anything, came to $570 on Newegg)
holy shit i thought i was going super prepared with a 24tb
Heh, yeah, I’m assuming hard drives are going to do the same thing graphics cards did.. get wildly expensive and never come back down, even if they could. With that in mind, this sounds like a good option.
Also I currently have no backups, and this much extra space fixes that handily. So it was sort of needed and something I was considering anyway.
I’m trying really really hard to convince myself I made the right choice here. 😅
i mean no one sees any of this getting any better any time soon. overkill? possibly. but it's one thing to not have to worry about for a while
edit: if it makes you feel any better, i usually build a new computer every 5-7 years, but this time i upgraded early, last january, 2025 expecting tariffs to make supply shitty-- i had no idea AI would be screwing up everything the way it has. definitely glad i made that decision, even though i went way over budget--i should be set PC-wise for quite a while
I rebuilt my pc just a few weeks before the ram explosion (replaced cpu, mobo, ram, and cooling), only thing it doesn’t have upgraded is graphics card, but the one it has is …… eh.. ok for now until I can afford to pick something else up. Also definitely glad to have made that decision. And probably will be with my storage choice too, once it’s hindsight. I just hate spending money.
So yeah, thanks, that helps. :)
I’ve been exclusively using Seagate EXOS drives for my Plex server for the last 15 years, and in several other Plex servers that I administer. Never had a single one fail. They’re excellent.
Had an 18tb Seagate exos shit the bed on my jellyfin server a couple weeks ago. It had about 3 years usage at least
No fucking way. Do you have any more diagnostic telemetry about that you’d be willing to share?
Edit: I don’t think it’s impossible for these drives to fail (Their failure rate isn’t zero), so I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just that their failure rate is so low, I’ve never heard of it before. But any information you’re willing to share I’d be happy to hear.
Havent pulled it yet since I'm waiting on a replacement. I'll update you when I pull it and check it out. I've had tons of drives die over the years but this one hits the hardest since prices have skyrocketed. Hopefully the other 5 drives hold the line for longer
Oh, so it was pretty recent? Sorry to hear that buddy.
What kind of drives are you buying? What’s your use case?
See, I buy those EXOS drives because they are sea gates top of the line enterprise class server grade hard drives. They’re expensive, but they’ve always been very much worth it.
Are you getting those, too? Or are you getting different brands in different models?
Honestly they were the cheapest for the size at the time i have 6 18tb seagate exos. Bought 4 in 2023 and 2 more a year later. Surprisingly there still the cheapest for the size even though they've doubled in price.
Jellyfin server for friends and family mainly. But I've been working on getting voice and video matrix server up and running recently because fuck discord. Also have a personal email server on a domain and a password manager
I also host the game of the month servers for the boys. Pal world 7dtd valheim etc. Its nice having the option to self host instead of being reliant on enshittified propriety corporate platforms.
Really surprised that you had one of those drives fail on you. It’s extremely rare. I’d still stick with them if I were you, even if I had one fail once.
Most folks would buy consumer-grade Seagate drives. I am having a hunch that those would not be remotely comparable to EXOS drives.
Most people would only ever need consumer grade drives. But if you’re running a server and you expected it to last a long time with a high level of reliability, you gotta go with the server grade drives.
The thing I didn’t realize is that EXOS drives are cheaper than other enterprise grade drives. They didn’t used to be. historically, they’ve always been the most expensive.
Are they original / how did you buy them / how much did they cost? I tried buying Seagate 3 times the last 4 years and every time it was shoddily repackaged with fake stickers and such
Honestly? Right off of Amazon. Pricing depends on the capacity, and I’m sure it’s gone up. But the pricing is always been very good, at or just beneath market rates. Seagate has an official Amazon store, so you’ll often see stuff on sale there. Including certified, pre-used drives, although I’ve never taken a plunge on that option.
I've had the opposite experience. I bought two Seagate drives 15-20 years ago and both failed. Lol I've been buying WD ever since and I'm still using them today. Please don't jinx me.
I had. And with Maxtor, and Samsung, Fujitsu, Quantum, IBM, and that company I forgot the name but it is started with H.
WD was nice. Not without problems, but nothing Fujitsu MPG tier.
HGST was created after Hitachi bought IBM’s hard drive business. It was then later bought by Western Digital.
Hitachi. Their hard drives were fucking shit.
I know this is anecdotal but I have a 15 year old hitachi hdd still in use. It’s no longer for anything critical but I’m just morbidly curious how long until it explodes.
For a long time I went with IBM, then Hitachi when they bought IBM's HDD division. Never had a problem with them. Though there was the infamous "Deathstar" and the click of death.
I remember that. Those deskstar hard drives were pretty big and well priced, but they had a gigantic failure rate right out of the gate. But, by then, both Seagate and Western Digital had serious standing in the hard drive game, and people weren’t going to IBM for hard drives anymore.
But, the “click of death“ didn’t start with those drives, it just happened at such a high rate, that is how most people became familiar with that symptom of hard drive failure.
Yeah, Hitachi.
Maybe I got a bad one, but it had a god awful loud noise. Works fine, but I switched back to WD after that