A Redditor tries to return a failed enterprise HDD to Toshiba, but it turns out that a replacement would take at least a year to arrive

Due to the AI industry's seemingly bottomless appetite for all things memory, SSD prices have soared. You would be forgiven for thinking that relying on Hard Disk Drives instead would be more cost-effective while we all wait for SSD prices to become slightly more sensible again. However, as one Redditor found out, the grass is not always greener.

The Redditor explained their company had bought a number of high-capacity HDDs from Toshiba mere months ago for its storage array. However, when one of the 20+ TB drives died, Toshiba would only offer "a refund of the original purchase price [and] not a refund of the current (significantly higher) replacement price," nor a replacement drive either.

Tom's Hardware says the documents it examined reveal that part of this refusal was on the grounds that Toshiba did not have the stock to replace the enterprise HDD in question. Apparently, if Toshiba had committed to replacing the enterprise drive, the customer would have had at least a year-long wait for a 24 TB HDD.

Some may consider HDDs outmoded, but if you don't need the data in a hurry, HDDs make sense for many corporate archive efforts. WD also just announced new HDD tech that promises 'flash-like' performance—though, even with improvements to the tech, none of that means HDDs are the forgotten hero we need right now.

The memory supply crisis hasn't just had the knock-on effect of raising SSD prices, but HDD costs as well, so a failure after only a few months is especially disappointing. As you may already be aware, HDDs do generally have more potential points of failure than SSDs due to the former's moving internal parts.

Still, a lifespan of a few months is far from the norm, with many modern HDDs lasting upwards of five years depending on use (comparatively, SSDs can last anywhere between five to 10 years or more, according to SanDisk). Microsoft's Project Silica proffers laser-etched glass that can store data for a purported 10,000 years, though that's not exactly a consumer-ready technology just yet.

Even though this particular situation involves hardware intended for a business, I am definitely now worrying about what would happen if either my own internal SSD or my two backup HDDs were to pick this moment in time to fail. On the one hand, this is exactly why I bought multiple drives back in the day. On the other, 'back in the day' is a few years ago now—easily more than five.

Unlike the aforementioned Redditor's enterprise HDDs, none of my kit would likely even be covered by a warranty anymore, ruling out any hopes of a refund for me personally. As I update our best SSD deals guide every Friday, I know exactly how rough it is out there right now—here's hoping hardware failure isn't in my immediate future.