"Disk is Cheap, Storage is Expensive" - Disk is Expensive!

I had a drive fail in my NAS this week, and while the important stuff is backed up, I went through the anxiety of waiting for the replacement to arrive, hoping that a second drive didn't fail in the meantime. The drive arrived, and the rebuild/repair is in progress, but this isn't about that.

I have been buying refurbished enterprise-class NAS drives with good success - this was my first failure. And we've all seen how RAM and drive prices have been going up thanks to AI companies buying everything in sight: system prices are up all over the place. Well, that hit home in a new way with this. A 12T spinning-rust, refurbed enterprise drive was over $200 more than what I paid for the last one, which was a little over a year ago. Tangentially the shipping cost was 1/5 of the drive price too, but that was caused by another issue I won't get in to here.

I'll just be over here, crossing my fingers that my other drives hang in there for a couple more years, when things will be better. And they will be better, right? Right??