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The world has gone mad

This morning I reluctantly got out my credit card and paid stupid-high money for a portable hard disk drive.

As someone who creates copious amounts of data in the form of high-bitrate 4K video files, I regularly need to back up those files onto external media for archiving purposes and those (once) cheap USB-connected external hard drives are the media of choice for such things.

I have a drawer filled with over 20TB of such files, spread across nearly a dozen of these devices.

In fact, these drives are a wonderful way of also documenting hard drive size, performance and cost.

The first drive in the archive library is a very old WD unit of just 1TB capacity. It's huge (probably a 5.25-inch unit) and has a USB 2 interface plus a quite large wall-wart power supply.

Yes, it's big, old and slow -- it was also rather expensive back when I bought it.

Over the years, these things have changed quite a bit.

The largest one I have is 4TB and cost me around $220 a few years ago. It's much smaller than that original WD unit and is entirely powered through the USB connection, no wall-wart required. It also has a USB 3 connection so is noticeably faster.

The problem with all these drives is that they are now chock-full.

Why is that a problem?

Well the 1TB SSD in my editing rig is now getting full (again) so I need to offload last month's work into the archive so as to make room for this month's footage.

This is why I bought a 2TB WD USB removable drive this morning.

That drive cost more than the 4TB one I bought a while back.

WTF?

I thought storage was something that got cheaper year-on-year and indeed this has been the case for decades. So what's changed? Why am I now paying quite a bit more than I did a couple of years ago?

They tell me it's because of AI and the demands it is placing on the supply of memory, GPUs and such.

Excuse me? How many AI datacentres are stuffed to the brim with 2TB Seagate 3.5-inch hard drives?

None of course. Enterprise hard drives are a whole different beast to the el-cheapo spinners that you'll find in these little plastic-cased USB-connected devices. Yet, strangely enough, we're now being charged as if they were a key component in the AI boom.

Maybe it's because Seagate is diverting capacity away from the consumer/commercial market towards enterprise-grade products and that's reduced the supply. However, I can't help but think it's simply greedy businesses taking advantage of any excuse to hike prices for higher profits.

After paying more than $100 for just a single week's protein at the supermarket on Saturday I must admit to feeling very poor these days. I'm just so glad that I'm not forced to fill my truck with petrol every week.

It is also with great fear that I await this month's power bill.

Is it just my imagination or are the general costs of living reaching unsustainable levels for many people?

Carpe Diem folks!

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