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I'm a bit worried it's a self fulfilling prophecy:

"People are buying hard drives to farm despite price increases, it must be profitable, maybe I should buy one too..."

I learned about Chia last week by googling "hard drive shortage" to figure out why suddenly hard drives prices are spiking where I live.

Definitely not a submarine.

But nobody was talking about the price delta then.

The narrative was "for 300 bucks you can make your computer so much faster, best investment ever". No mention about increasing HDD prices, nobody cared.

DirectX is a bad example, it's now a part of Windows and you don't ship it anymore.

Bundling shared libraries is also used in big apps for faster build times and for more physical separation between modules.

Arguably the final release version could be statically linked, but that could be subtly different than what the devs are using.

I'm not so sure, in 2012 me and a lot of friends switched to SSD because it made the computer so much faster, not because there was a HDD shortage. And the tech press at the time was full of articles about how amazing SSDs are and how everybody should get one.

Burning your regular customers is terrible business practice. It's not always about the money.

Also, remember when Martin Shkreli increased the price of an anti-parasitic drug by 5000%? That upset a lot of people, and arguably it's what put him in jail. Of course, HDDs are not quite the same as vital medicine.

My advice would be to decide today if you want them or not. They are not going to get cheaper, and could get significantly more expensive in days.

Opportunity cost. By keeping my cash in bitcoin I can now buy (well, not with this shortage) 5 times more hard drives than last black Friday.

Open Amazon and look up hard drive prices and availability.

This one is easy to fact check.

Sample size 1: every 3 months I need to buy a large hard drive (14TB+). I buy external USB ones since they are the cheapest.

Since it was due, in the last couple of weeks I was scanning prices in Romania daily, in case I get lucky with a discount. In the last week, prices surged 60-100%, and stock disappeared for 4 TB+.

I panicked and after a lot of scanning I managed to buy a slightly smaller one than I needed with just a 20% surcharge.

Prices on Amazon UK are also out of control.

So now we are out of chips, CPUs, GPUs and hard drives. What a time to be alive :)

PS: I would love to hear Backblaze take on this shortage.