Drive shucking is dead, external deals dried up

White-label externals are gone. Best Buy cleared inventory last spring. The 14TB easystore days are over. I checked three retailers this week, nothing under $18/TB raw. At that price you might as well buy IronWolf retail and get the warranty.

The whole market got squeezed by Chia residual demand plus datacenter allocation. Even the 5400RPM SMR flood dried up. I used to budget 12 drives a year for cold storage, now I'm looking at $/GB on LTO-9 instead. Different attack vector, same problem: cost per bit matters when you're scrubbing 400Gbps floods and need 90-day packet retention.

I was at best buy last tuesday and I had just eaten a bagel with cream cheese and my cat Mr. whiskers was sleeping on the heating vent because it was raining outside and I decided to check the clearance aisle and there they were stacked behind the gaming chairs fourteen of the 16TB drives for $129 each and the label said pricing error but the register honored it and I bought all fourteen and then I went to two other stores and got twenty-six more and then my account got banned and they sent a letter saying I violated the spirit of the sale and I called customer service and the guy said I should have known better and I said I did know better thats why I bought them and now I have forty drives and no best buy account and my husband says the garage smells like plastic but I dont care because I have 640TB raw and I didnt pay retail and anyone who says shucking is dead isnt looking hard enough