My dragons' hoard of data is growing slowly but steadily, to the point where I needed to add another drive to my #2 RAID pool to store it. So I want to see who had 18TB SATA drives in hand (which is the size I need to expand my storage pool). Not only have the prices shot up a lot, which I expected from recent media commentary, but no NZ sellers seem to have stock of anything decent (Exos, WD Gold or Ultrastars) at all, at any price. Worse, the go-to international sellers like serverpartdeals don't seem to have any stock either. It's a mix of media files, emulation images and LLM models taking most of the space at the moment. I seem to add circa 1.5-2TB a month.

I'm currently using some of the externals that I had been using for backup to temporarily offload files, but this isn't a great fix, as it means the files aren't available quickly and also means that at the rate I'm going I won't have backups for any but the most critical files by around years' end. 

Even tiny little 1TB and 2TB drives seem to have shot up a lot.

I'm curious about what strategies are people here are using to cope with the situation, and what viable strategies they may have discovered (BD-R, LTO tape, importing used/refurbished drives, something else?).

The budget is (very) finite, small children and a mortgage in this job market ensure that, but I need to find a practical and affordable option in the next 6 or so months.

And no petal, "just delete some files" isn't the approach I'm looking for.

Thoughts/Comments?