After Keiths question about his backup drive, I took a look
at the prices. The prices are not suggestive "we should tell
the users to buy bigger disks". Don't do that.

I asked CoPilot to draw me a plot. As an example
of a couple of the items, these were a kind of "UnObtainium".
Just to show the advertising style of my computer store. These
are the top end of the graph.

WESTERN DIGITAL Red Pro 26TB Desktop Internal Hard Drives
$1,439.99
ELIGIBLE FOR FREE SHIPPING
Not Available for Order

WESTERN DIGITAL Red Pro 24TB Desktop Internal Hard Drives
$1,699.99
ELIGIBLE FOR FREE SHIPPING
Not Available for Order

So the answer I get from CoPilot, CoPilot does NOT draw me a picture :-)

Instead, it emits Python code to draw the plot.
It must have taken me 45 minutes to debug that code
(because I don't code in Python FFS :-) ). I found
a web page that debugs such code...

https://www.codeconvert.ai/python-code-checker?id=49e7e6e8-dd24-41c3-b9df-c351005c6fc9

I ran the code in WSL2, and that's why it is saving to /mnt/d/temp instead of D:\temp .

[Picture] xy_scatter_plot.png

https://imgur.com/a/bqVlfl3

https://postimg.cc/2qRjMcmm

Not that it's important, this is the code ("plotme.py"). python3 plotme.py

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import os

# Ensure path exists
if not os.path.exists('/mnt/d/temp'):
os.makedirs('/mnt/d/temp')

# Data
x = np.array([2,4,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26])
y = np.array([274.99,301.49,334.99,479.99,519.99,624.99,719.99,844.99,889.99,999.99,1109.99,1224.99,1699.99,1439.99])

plt.style.use('seaborn')
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.scatter(x, y, color='blue', s=60)
plt.title('Storage Capacity vs Price')
plt.xlabel('Terabytes')
plt.ylabel('Dollars')
plt.grid(True)
plt.xticks(np.arange(min(x), max(x)+2, 2))
plt.yticks(np.arange(0, max(y)+300, 300))

output_path = '/mnt/d/temp/xy_scatter_plot.png'
plt.savefig(output_path, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')

print(f"Generated scatter plot and saved to {output_path}")

Now, in those 45 minutes, I could have booted the machine
with LibreOffice Calc on it, and done the graph there.
But where would be the fun in that.

This is our LLM-AI future. "Bake me a cake". "Um, here you go,
a bag of flour, a cup of water, some baking soda, stick that
in a pan in the oven and there's your cake, sir!".

You can see the graph is relatively linear, and the air breather
drives likely go up to 12TB, the ones bigger than that could be
Helium. But it doesn't seem to make that much difference to
price (except that disk prices have doubled between January
and July of 2026).

My fellow TechBros... you will be learning Python. It is
the language of the Gods, apparently.

Paul


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 7/17/26 12:30 AM, Paul wrote:

After Keiths question about his backup drive, I took a look
at the prices. The prices are not suggestive "we should tell
the users to buy bigger disks". Don't do that.

I asked CoPilot to draw me a plot. As an example
of a couple of the items, these were a kind of "UnObtainium".
Just to show the advertising style of my computer store. These
are the top end of the graph.

WESTERN DIGITAL Red Pro 26TB Desktop Internal Hard Drives
$1,439.99
ELIGIBLE FOR FREE SHIPPING
Not Available for Order

WESTERN DIGITAL Red Pro 24TB Desktop Internal Hard Drives
$1,699.99
ELIGIBLE FOR FREE SHIPPING
Not Available for Order

So the answer I get from CoPilot, CoPilot does NOT draw me a picture :-)

Instead, it emits Python code to draw the plot.
It must have taken me 45 minutes to debug that code
(because I don't code in Python FFS :-) ). I found
a web page that debugs such code...

https://www.codeconvert.ai/python-code-checker?id=49e7e6e8-dd24-41c3-b9df-c351005c6fc9

I ran the code in WSL2, and that's why it is saving to /mnt/d/temp instead of D:\temp .

[Picture] xy_scatter_plot.png

https://imgur.com/a/bqVlfl3

https://postimg.cc/2qRjMcmm

Not that it's important, this is the code ("plotme.py"). python3 plotme.py

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import os

# Ensure path exists
if not os.path.exists('/mnt/d/temp'):
os.makedirs('/mnt/d/temp')

# Data
x = np.array([2,4,4,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26])
y = np.array([274.99,301.49,334.99,479.99,519.99,624.99,719.99,844.99,889.99,999.99,1109.99,1224.99,1699.99,1439.99])

plt.style.use('seaborn')
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.scatter(x, y, color='blue', s=60)
plt.title('Storage Capacity vs Price')
plt.xlabel('Terabytes')
plt.ylabel('Dollars')
plt.grid(True)
plt.xticks(np.arange(min(x), max(x)+2, 2))
plt.yticks(np.arange(0, max(y)+300, 300))

output_path = '/mnt/d/temp/xy_scatter_plot.png'
plt.savefig(output_path, dpi=300, bbox_inches='tight')

print(f"Generated scatter plot and saved to {output_path}")

Now, in those 45 minutes, I could have booted the machine
with LibreOffice Calc on it, and done the graph there.
But where would be the fun in that.

This is our LLM-AI future. "Bake me a cake". "Um, here you go,
a bag of flour, a cup of water, some baking soda, stick that
in a pan in the oven and there's your cake, sir!".

You can see the graph is relatively linear, and the air breather
drives likely go up to 12TB, the ones bigger than that could be
Helium. But it doesn't seem to make that much difference to
price (except that disk prices have doubled between January
and July of 2026).

My fellow TechBros... you will be learning Python. It is
the language of the Gods, apparently.

Paul

You should plot Terabyte per dollar maybe?

--
Mint 22.3, Thunderbird 140.12.1esr, Firefox 152.0.6
Alan K.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 7/17/2026 8:21 AM, Alan K. wrote:

You should plot Terabyte per dollar maybe?

All I was after, "is a line". Sometimes the lines
have "sweet spots", and a certain size of drive is
the right one to buy.

In this case, the first thing you notice, is the
extrapolation back to zero capacity, on the left.

An empty drive housing would cost you $230 or so.
That's not normal. An empty drive housing should
cost you about $50-$60 or so. And I guess that
encourages you to buy one drive of 2X capacity,
rather than two drives of X capacity. The 2TB drive
in the example, is above the line, and a very bad bargain.

And the 24TB model ("which you cannot order"), is
way above the line as well, and a bad bargain.

Candidates for purchase, might be 4,8,10,12 , as they're
air breathers and fall more or less on the line. The platters
can afford to be thicker, and one generation older.

The Y axis intercept of the Helium 16,18,20,22 is different
and is lower than $230. But once the magic purchase price
gets up around $1000, that tends to "squash" demand. I know
my price tolerance is lower than $1000, maybe above $500 or
so, I'm thinking of taking up another hobby. That's why my
last drive purchases were 8 and 10, as that is what happened
to be in stock at the time, and at that time, the price was
half of the price today. So maybe I paid $325 for one of those
drives. At the time, there were no intermediate size ones,
and the next available might have been 18-20TB or so.

The TechBro purchases right now, are likely HAMR drives and
we can only guess what the price is on those. Those are laser assisted.
And there would have to be a laser-per-head. Ten platters would
be twenty lasers, at a dollar per laser. Think of the optics a pig
like that would need (the target is down at the nm level).

No matter how we plot the data, it's not a time to be buying
a hard drive. Checking line shape is just for amusement value.
Imagine making a RAID array right now, with prices like that.

Paul

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 07/17/2026 12:30 AM, Paul wrote:

x = np.array([2,4,4,
y = np.array([274.99,301.49,334.99,

?
Prices for the 2TB (HDD and SSD) and 4 TB(HDD) are lower than the above
array numbers
2 TB internal HDD $70-130; $150-250 SSD
4 TB internal HDD $100-180


At the opposite end.
The referenced internal 26 TB is $1144(quite a bit less than $1699)
- WD Red Pro 26TB 7200 RPM 512MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" HD OEM -
WD260KFGX <https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-red-pro-wd260kfgx-26tb-enterprise-nas-hard-drives-7200-rpm/p/N82E16822234582?>


--
...w­¤?ñ?¤

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Fri, 7/17/2026 11:12 AM, ....winston wrote:

On 07/17/2026 12:30 AM, Paul wrote:

x = np.array([2,4,4,
y = np.array([274.99,301.49,334.99,

?
Prices for the 2TB (HDD and SSD) and 4 TB(HDD) are lower than the above array numbers
ÿ2 TB internal HDD $70-130; $150-250 SSD
ÿ4 TB internal HDD $100-180

At the opposite end.
The referenced internal 26 TB is $1144(quite a bit less than $1699)
ÿ- WD Red Pro 26TB 7200 RPM 512MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" HD OEM - WD260KFGX <https://www.newegg.com/western-digital-red-pro-wd260kfgx-26tb-enterprise-nas-hard-drives-7200-rpm/p/N82E16822234582?>

Given one store was the source of the prices ("consistency of dataset"),
the objective was to see the pricing pattern of the supplier (WD) peeking through.

In the past, supplier prices had an inflection point, and
users would plot up the numbers, to see if an inflection point
existed. For example, years ago, the 4TB drives were the
cheapest per TB.

But in later years, the supplier seemed to be attempting
to make the line perfectly straight.

The line shouldn't be perfectly straight, as air breathers
go up to 12TB now (that's due to the price of Helium and
the need to seal the larger drives), and the Helium ones
are higher capacity than that. Yet, the line still has an
overall straightness to it, which does not hint at the
air versus Helium break point.

Prices are all over the place. I could "save money" by
changing brands, but it's pretty difficult to get good info
on the reliability of a thing. For example, the 4TB Seagate
I bought a while ago, it has some disturbing behavior at
startup, which *prevents* Windows from booting from the drive.
The drive is now demoted to "data only" drive status.
This is not a behavior you can predict from marketing info.
And the drive in question, is the first revision and was given
no firmware update. A later drive revision of the same family,
they made a newer firmware for it (original firmware plus a newer
firmware was available for it). Whether that was for the
same firmware issue, there aren't exactly release notes.

Paul

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On 07/17/2026 11:52 AM, Paul wrote:

Given one store was the source of the prices ("consistency of dataset"),
the objective was to see the pricing pattern of the supplier (WD) peeking through.

In the past, supplier prices had an inflection point, and
users would plot up the numbers, to see if an inflection point
existed. For example, years ago, the 4TB drives were the
cheapest per TB.

The line shouldn't be perfectly straight, as air breathers
go up to 12TB now (that's due to the price of Helium and
the need to seal the larger drives), and the Helium ones
are higher capacity than that. Yet, the line still has an
overall straightness to it, which does not hint at the
air versus Helium break point.

Prices are all over the place.

Paul

W/R Inflection point.
- pricing benefits(per TB) exist in the past and today.

Google AI generated data and generated graph(from same data) for cost of
HDD drive and HDD capacity

<https://imgur.com/a/qolYmj3>

Graphs:
Storage Capacity vs Total Drive Price
and
HDD Storage Capacity vs Average Price Per TB

Here's the AI results for the data

Capacity to Price-Per-TB Breakdown
2 TB: $35 to $40 per TB ? $70 to $80 total
4 TB: $22 to $25 per TB ? $90 to $100 total
8 TB to 12 TB: $15 to $22 per TB ? $120 to $260 total
16 TB to 20 TB: $14 to $18 per TB ? $250 to $360 total
24 TB to 26 TB: $35 to $45 per TB ? $840 to $1,170 total

Note: Only HDD, no special request to AI for types of HDD(Air, Helium)
or SSD

The best overall value in the HDD data appears to be the 8-20 TB capacity.

--
...w­¤?ñ?¤

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.18
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)