Why Server Pull Hard Drives Are the Hidden Goldmine of Cheap Storage
There’s something funny about modern hard drives. On one hand, they’re cheaper than ever in terms of raw cost per terabyte. On the other hand, if you walk into a retail store or browse Amazon, you’d think your only options are $300 “NAS-optimized” drives covered in marketing fluff or USB external drives designed for casual backups. If you actually need serious storage — not a couple of terabytes, but 30TB, 50TB, 100TB — retail pricing quickly becomes a problem. And that’s exactly why server pull hard drives have become one of the best-kept secrets in the DIY storage world. Let’s break it down. What Are Server Pulls? “Server pulls” are hard drives that have been removed from working enterprise machines during upgrades, lease returns, or datacenter decoms. In most cases, these drives are not defective or broken — they’re simply no longer new enough to stay in production environments. Corporations and cloud providers often run on strict hardware refresh cycles, meaning drives get...