Hard drives are so expensive that a user flew to the USA to buy HDDs there. He explains that it was cheaper than ordering directly at home.
A user reports in the subreddit r/DataHoarder that he wanted to buy hard drives. However, the high prices have now also reached hard drives and SSDs and in the UK, where the user lives, the prices were far too expensive.
For this reason, the user decided to fly to the USA with his wife to buy 10 hard drives with a capacity of 28 TB each. This is because prices in the USA were significantly lower than the selling prices in the UK.
After observing the prices of 28 TB hard drives in the UK literally skyrocket, I decided to book a short trip to New York shortly after New Year to stock up on some 28 TB hard drives, and since the prices just kept rising, I decided to buy 10 of them.
Buying hard drives in the USA is cheaper than ordering at home
After he ordered the hard drives, he booked a flight and a hotel in New York to pick up his purchased hard drives. He explained that in the end he regretted buying 10 hard drives. He should have taken 8 instead, as it would have been logistically easier and his whole suitcase would not have been filled with hard drives.
Otherwise, the user stated that there were no major issues: He was able to bring the hard drives back to the UK without any difficulties in his carry-on luggage. In conclusion, he stated:
It is definitely doable. It was a somewhat crazy idea to invest so much money in external drives, but in the end, it was worth it.
He does not explain in his post what he needs all the hard drives for. He only stated that 4 hard drives with 16 TB each were simply not enough for him, and that is why he decided to buy 10 of them in the USA.
Why a HDD instead of an SSD? Hard drives are still considered a very good alternative if you want to store large amounts of data. Although SSDs are significantly faster than conventional hard drives, they are also considerably more expensive.
In addition, SSDs are generally more susceptible to wear when you frequently write large amounts of data. The durability of hard drives is greater than that of many SSDs that can be ordered by consumers on Amazon.
RAM and HDDs are already very expensive, but SSDs are following the high prices. A manager from one of the largest memory manufacturers, Kioxia, explained in a conversation that the time for cheap SSDs is over. And a sample already shows: The SSDs are as expensive as they haven’t been for months: Manager of an SSD company says, “the days of cheap 1 TB SSDs” are over, confirming that the supply is already sold out until 2027
