According to my spreadsheet.. last time I bought a few 20TB drives they were $240 or $11.99/TB. For the same refurb drive they want $429 or $21.44/TB. Between HDD, RAM, and GPU prices, my next tentative build just went up about ~$2000 in the last 9 months.
My existing drives have a 5-year warranty and the vendor hasn’t missed a beat through many RMA requests the past few years, but I’m almost afraid to buy from anyone else in case the prices keep skyrocketing. Having the RMA insurance is worth its weight in gold right now even if it takes two weeks to ship out and get the replacement.
I’m afraid this is not a bubble, but the new normal. Or even worse: The period where prices rise, but at least the hardware is available. If you look into the systemic risk right now (loss of 20% oil/petrochemicals, loss of major Helium producer, loss of fertilizer …) there’s a lot of shortages down the road. Helium and petrochemicals are especially bad for IT manufacturing.
I’m optimistic that’s not the case after deep-diving this spike in demand and comparing similar events of the past. This abnormal spike will wane at some point, hopefully sooner than later, and I think we’ll see prices drop from the absurd levels they are now. It’s possible they won’t return to the same or lower, but they also won’t be 50% higher. I can see a 5-10% increase in cost as a high estimate for a new normal increase in cost.
In the meantime, you either do without or choke it down. I hope we see the market flooded with cheap storage in the near future. Stay frosty!
I’d be curious to know.. what’s the plan when you can’t source a replacement? I haven’t had to RMA a drive in the past few months , but I wonder how it’s affecting the refurb market.
I only run mirrors too. In fact, my new build was going to go from four 14TB in mirrored vdevs at 22TB, to a triple mirror of 22TB drives for more protection and less hardware. Then I got stunlocked with a kidney shot at the pricing.
I have a series of 10 TiB drives I bought in sets of twos for the mirror pool a had a few years ago. They were all used from some Cisco UCS servers that ATT offloaded or some similar large auctions and some are also shucked from easy stores. It’s basically a split sas/sata.
All that to say, they are getting up there in spindle hours. The market is high now and it’s crazy, so they are just gonna have to keep spinning
I, at least, am holding off on any new projects that require new servers, disks, etc. My current work involves optimizing clients’ environments to keep them running with what they have, or, if expansion is necessary, making the most informed purchase possible.
I believe that at least until the beginning of 2028, we will be facing the same problem. I say this because all the large hard drives manufactured by companies have already been sold to AI data centers, so it will take at least a year for all the pent-up demand from 2026 to be met in 2027 with the quantity of new disks, memory, etc., that would have been used that year, so that perhaps in 2028, prices will start to fall.
What I’ve actually been doing is having the client analyze the real need for all the content they have on their TrueNAS devices. For example, many times the client stored snapshots of a pool for 120 days or more. What I’ve been doing is changing the snapshot policy to be more intelligent, such as only one snapshot per week during that 120-day period, leaving the daily snapshot only for the last 15 days (this reduced storage by a few GB for some clients and a few TB for others). In addition, we’ve been analyzing the content, seeing if it’s necessary to keep certain files. In some cases, we’ve been analyzing software installers of several GB that were legacy versions and no longer in use, and in some cases, the same installer was in more than one location on the file server.
In other words, for the next few months, our work will focus more on optimizing what we have and planning, so that in case of disk loss, we have a margin to deliver the same quality at the lowest possible cost.
, but I wonder how it’s affecting the refurb market.