Yah its rough out there right now with no end in sight…collapse of AI data center bubble may help…but yah good luck. Ebay prices on used drives are also out of this world as well. I’ve given up looking.

I’ve been taking my chances with refurb 6TB SAS drives since at about $120 they cost what my new 6TB drives cost 4 years ago. Im just trusting in the ZFS gods to never let me be more than 2 drives down at once.

I'll make sure to grab some for you before I wake up.

I use second hand enterprise drives.

I also use triple parity and mergerfs/snapraid to reduce wear.

You may find that you need to migrate to a system that lets you use smaller disks in order to afford expansion. That means away from zfs.

Back when zfs was just barely becoming usable by normal people I tried it out. The biggest problem was how much ram it needed. Ram cost about twenty times as much per gigabyte then as it does now. The second biggest problem was that you had to completely replace disk pools. Disks cost about a hundred times more per gigabyte back then compared to now.

I have used zfs a lot since then. It is a technology that relies on the users ability to buy more drives all at once when it’s time to upgrade.