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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night.

One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.

I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.

[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.

ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.

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I believe many sellers an eBay are illegally manipulating the market, and eBay is tacitly helping them by ignoring and removing feedback.

For example this seller: https://www.ebay.com/str/disctechllc

“Accidentally miss-priced” a bunch of drives, and then instead of canceling the orders, refunded everyone, but still shipped packages: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...

I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the “26” sold on their listings that are now astronomically priced: https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT

Edit: They also lied on their customs declarations (!)

Holy shit, they want three grand for a 3.84TB drive. That's absurd.

Yep, and it looks like they sold 26 at that price - which they did not. They sold 26 at 10x less or so.

Yeah, totally agree. I believe that the axing of several anti-monopoly enforcement departments and regulations in the largest market in the world (the US) is effectively a very big wink wink, nudge nudge to market participants; Trump basically got to play as Oprah for Big Businesses everywhere: "You get to be a cartel! You get to be a cartel! Everybody gets to be a cartel!"

He's basically created a sort of one-sided economic "Ferry Ordeal" (like the Joker on The Dark Knight [1]), basically leaving us consumers to not be exploited only if there are decent men at the helm of big businesses. It could be asymmetrical instead of one-sided if you consider that the people can only tolerate so much squeezing before they start clamoring for guillotines [2].

[1]: https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Ferry_Ordeal_and_Skyscraper_B...

[2]: https://youtu.be/TMHCw3RqulY

I have a home array too, though based on 4Tb drives (6x, two lots of RAID10, one 3x4T one 3x6T, linked as an LVM volume as I extended it by adding the second array some time ago).

I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…

Three years seems ridiculously low lifetime - I'd hope that was covered by warranty.

As I said, they were used, so I knew that a drive breaking was kind of an inevitability. As far as I'm aware there's no warranty, I certainly didn't pay for an extended one.

Good news though, since writing this I just started playing with dmesg and smartctl, it actually might be something with the SATA connector. At least those are still pretty cheap.

It makes sense, at the time you bought them there was no supply crunch plus being run in RAID. Would have been a decent deal.

Nowadays I feel like an underworld scrap goblin, all the old PVRs from family and friends are being cracked open for the HDDs. Time to slink off to my cave of spinning platters.

I've recently bought 3x32TB (new) and 2x28TB (recertified) drives for a new NAS as my old one started running out of space on some drives (local LLMs and datasets or media for dataset preparations are huge these days) as I expect the prices to go up considerably due to most HDD manufacturers being booked years in advance already. Some drives don't even make it to retail at all (44TB Seagate).

also bought a handful of 14 to 16tb drives. They sold for such a low price last year I thought it can't be wrong to grab them.

It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.

Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?

Yeah I have no idea the direct cause. I didn't think that the SATA controllers for a hard drive took that much.

It could be a secondary effect; SSDs have gotten so expensive that people are willing to put up with spinners and thus there's an increased demand. No idea, I'm sure an economist or something will do a write up of the downstream effects of the RAM crunch causes eventually.

GenAI and/or smart glasses video? WD already sold their entire 2026 production of nearline drives for data centers.

I've seen lots of articles on HN of AI startups building massive drive arrays for mass storage.

AI runs on data above all else. Gotta feed the compute.

If I need storage now and I can't get flash disks, I will buy mechanical. Production will not ramp up overnight (or at all - there is no point investing in scaling up if I think the situation is only temporary), so an increase in demand inevitably will result in prices going up.

Btw gas goes up when oil goes up not just because it can replace it in some applications, but also because it is often produced and transported in the same areas as oil, by the same companies involved in oil, so it is typically affected in similar ways.

Customer demands (or hoarding) sentiments kept us busy on the production lines of racks with 1K+ drives and I think we've already shipped out more than 5K of them since early last year. No supply constraints on cpu and memory parts due to the way this sku was designed but damn did we have so many defective hdd's; I'd ballpark about 20% from the vendor and 10% from mishandling.

If you buy (hypothetically) a lot of disks and don't use them for, say 10 years, will they degrade?

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