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…
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 (!)
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...
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
AI runs on data above all else. Gotta feed the compute.