En-Disk-ification

### Storage Degraded 😱 In June one of the Western Digital Red HDDs in my trusty Synology 2-bay NAS gave up the ghost. This has happened every few years and has typically been my motivation to exploit the ever-cheapening nature of rotating rust drives to "leap-frog" up a capacity step. The first iteration of this "grandfather's axe" of a NAS had a pair of 2TB WD Reds; over the journey I've stepped them up, one-at-a-time, to a pair of 4TB. As it's been a few years, I fully expected to be able to grab a secondhand/refurbed 6TB drive for circa AUD$100, slap it in and carry on. It was at this point I became aware of [the "AI"/LLM-driven storage drought](https://hackernoon.com/the-hidden-storage-crisis-behind-ai-why-hdd-and-ssd-prices-keep-rising), and its effect on consumer drive prices:

Terrifying (new, retail) drive price chart from PC Part Picker (AUD$). It almost goes without saying that secondhand/refurbished drive prices are following the same trajectory. ### Mitigation As running my NAS (which hosts multiple Time Machine mounts amongst lots of other valuable data) on a single disk makes me feel suuuper-nervous, I had to break my own personal rule and buy a drive from overseas - a Hong Kong based eBay store. It's only 4TB and yet cost ~AUD$150, so it's definitely not the incremental improvement I've come to expect. And sure enough, it's been 2 months now and the thing hasn't arrived. I don't know if it's stuck in customs, or has been porch-pirated. The parcel tracking doesn't seem to work. Maybe eBay sold their spare drives...