Now, I have to be strategic about every drive I buy.<\/p>\n
I started noticing a spike in hard drive prices<\/a> toward the end of 2025. When I went back through my receipts, I found that I’d paid $400 for a 4-terabyte drive in 2022. Today, a comparable drive costs around $1,200.<\/p>\n When I tallied up what I’d paid in 2025 for drives, it was over $20,000. That’s why I stopped buying them<\/a> entirely this year.<\/p>\n Luckily, I’ve accumulated hundreds of hard drives over my career. Every new job, I’d simply buy a few more. So, 20 years and thousands of jobs later, I’ve become something of a hard-drive hoarder \u2014 and that habit is finally paying off.<\/p>\n How I used AI to solve my problem<\/p>\n Allen Cooley\u00a0<\/p>\n Business Insider<\/p>\n Commercial photography<\/a> requires a lot of storage. I usually need three or four portable drives for a job, and sometimes as many as five or six. And because a client might come back three years later to renew the assets, I have to keep the files long after a shoot is over.<\/p>\n On a recent campaign that involved both video and still photography, buying that amount of new drives would have cost me $4,000 to $5,000.<\/p>\n That was money I didn’t want to spend.<\/p>\n Want more Business Insider in your news feed?<\/p>\n \n Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you\u2019re searching for what matters.\n <\/p>\n So, I used Claude to help<\/a> me build a program that catalogs what’s stored across my drives. Now, I can search for a file, find every drive that contains a copy, and figure out what I can safely delete to free up space.<\/p>\n Instead of manually organizing hundreds of drives, I can essentially have a conversation with my archive. It’s saved me days, if not weeks, worth of work.<\/p>\n The irony isn’t lost on me: I believe demand from the data centers powering AI is one reason storage has gotten so expensive<\/a>, and then I turn around and use Claude to help me avoid spending thousands of dollars on new drives.<\/p>\n I don’t know how long I can avoid buying more drives<\/p>\n Cooley isn’t sure how long he can keep reusing old storage drives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Business Insider<\/p>\n How long I can keep avoiding new hard drives depends on how much work comes in.<\/p>\n If I’m shooting only still photography, I can probably keep this going for a while. Video is different. I’m primarily hired to shoot video<\/a> and stills together, and those jobs require so much storage that eventually I’ll need more drives.<\/p>\n Also, my business is down about 30% from its peak in 2023. Last year was particularly rough, and this year has been roughly flat compared with last year.<\/p>\n I don’t blame all of that on the advertising industry. Earlier in my career, I worked 10- or 13-hour days, answered emails at midnight and on weekends, and made myself extraordinarily accessible.<\/p>\n Now I have two young daughters, and I’m more likely to spend my time at a soccer game or taking one of them somewhere. So when I look at that decline, I know some of it reflects a choice I’ve made to spend less time working<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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