Yeah, I looked up the 20TB drive new, it's $1000.

Actually $700 for a 20+ TB drive is insane, even new. I use 24TB drives in my media server, and I was able to buy them for $480 this time last year. I'm crossing my fingers that I won't have to buy more until the price goes back down.

ssd cost roughly the same as cheapo hdd of same low volume (1-2tb), it's kinda funny

(probably signifies that problem is very weird, 9 plates hdd uses proportionally more reading heads and plates, so wtf is that price scaling (not actuators, not magnetic heads, not plates) i cannot tell, they use minuscule amount of ram, pcb is trivial itself, maybe the spinning drive? but that would be hilarious)

Recertified doesn't actually mean used though, they are certified to meet the same quality standards as a brand new one.

Serverpartdeals blog post about this

I miss being able to get two 14TB drives for 550€ in a WD my book duo.

RTX 5090s are going for $4000+ right now.

A coworker of mine bought 5 18tb recertified hard drives maybe a year and a half ago, and he spent about $500 on them, those same drives from the same vendor would host him somewhere in the ballpark of $6000 now.

Hard drives are still the king of mass storage, so datacenters use them extensively

There's limited global manufacturing capacity. AI companies have been buying up all they can get to store their datasets on. They're not fast enough for the models to run off but they still need them to store the training data which is in the thousands of petabytes.

Hey chat you think this might have something to do with anything?

(Clarifying questions indicated guided munitions use RAM that's on a totally different supply chain but i find it funny to think of the u.s. having RAM shortages because they literally blew it all up for no reason)

and I was hoping to setup a raid before prices exploded

I got a 22tb drive a few years back for 200

Some slightly bad news on that front, those are becoming the small enterprise drives. Even worse quickly having stock eaten up completely due to the Ai bubble

Assuming you mean hard drives not SSDs: almost nothing. If prices scaled perfectly linearly and all things were equal at these prices per TB it would be worth about $6.

But all things are not equal. Your drives are assuredly much older than these drives, probably more worn and the power cost of running it compared to capacity and use of limited SATA connectors would not be worth it for any kind of hot storage which lowers its value. The only way to sell them would be in a lot of at least 8, ideally more and you'd probably be lucky to get $3/drive if you can prove the SMART data on all of them is good and they work. Also if they're not enterprise drives like these are knock that down a bit more.

Buying drives that small and old is little better than gambling and playing the odds so you have to buy an awful lot of them awfully cheap to deal with the fact you're assuredly getting some bad eggs. You also have to figure in the hassle for the buyer of managing say backing up their 10TB data-set to 40 drives like this including plugging them in, unplugging, regular testing every year and storing them somewhere safe as well as dealing with failures and documenting what is on each drive. Most people conclude it isn't worth the hassle though there's enough desperate people out there now that some might bite.

250GB SSDs on the other hand assuming they're not in a failing state are still worth some change as you can use them to install an OS on various homelab devices like a server, firewall, etc.

I will give you a stick of gum