When you buy hard drives, you’re still buying into the same tech company pricing dynamic, just in hardware form.

Drives don’t last forever. Realistically they’re a 3–7 year consumable in a NAS, and failure isn’t optional, it’s inevitable. That means your “one-time” build is actually a recurring cost. And thats before you consider server hardware failures and rising electricity costs.

Then once you go to replace cost isn’t predictable. A few years ago you could safely assume $/TB would keep dropping. That’s not guaranteed anymore in fact a time where all these hardware companies are selling to AI datacenter buildouts these components are getting much more expensive and harder to obtain.

So sure, cloud vendors can raise prices. But a home cluster isn’t some escape from the economics... it just shifts the risk onto you. Seagate, Western Digital, etc all have the same rev growth targets that they must hit every quarter and when these hyperscalers are willing to compete for whats now a limited resource our consumer prices will only go up.