Published Oct 26, 2026, 5:01 PM EDT

After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh).

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year, you know about the PC hardware crisis we're going through. It started with RAM, but soon engulfed GPUs, SSDs, and even hard drives. Storage may not be a priority for gamers, but NAS and home lab users need tons of it at affordable prices. And that combination has all but disappeared if you look at consumer and NAS drives .

If you've been looking to buy new hard drives, paying $350–$450 for an 8TB–12TB NAS drive has probably felt insane. Even 8TB consumer HDDs are going for around $300, so the situation is bad all around.…