eRacks Systems Tech Blog
Open Source Experts Since 1999
The Price You See Is the Price: Transparent Server Pricing in a Shortage
This month, one of our distributors repriced a GPU by 29 percent. Overnight. The same card, quoted to us on a Thursday, cost $280 more on Friday. Server-grade DDR5 ECC memory (error-correcting code memory, the kind servers use to detect and fix bit errors) is running $24 to $28 per gigabyte on the street, roughly triple what it cost before the 2026 memory shortage. Enterprise hard drives jumped too.
In a market like this, most server vendors reach for the same three tricks. We think you should know what they are, because we built our whole pricing system to do the opposite.
The three tricks
The teaser config. The advertised price quietly assumes last year’s components: less memory than the workload needs, a boot drive standing in for storage, a processor two generations back. The real configuration costs thousands more, which you discover after you are invested.
“Call for pricing.” If the vendor will not put a number on the page, the number depends on who is asking. That is not pricing, that is negotiation, and it always favors the side with more information. That is never the buyer.
The silent quote. A price quoted in a volatile market is a bet. Some vendors let you carry a stale quote right up to the purchase order, then “revise” it when backing out is hardest.
What we do instead
The configurator price is the price. Every configuration on eracks.com produces a real, orderable number, computed from what the components actually cost us. No “starting at” games: change the memory, the drives, the GPUs, and watch the price move in both directions, up and down, with the parts market.
Robots watch the market so the catalog stays true. Automated trackers re-check memory, drive, and GPU street prices daily and weekly, and feed re-pricing that a human reviews before it ships. When a component spikes, we re-price openly rather than let the old number quietly stop being true.
When a build goes underwater, we fix the build in the open. This week our own margin checks flagged two NAS models whose entry configurations no longer made sense at current drive prices. We did not pad the price and we did not gut the spec quietly. We changed the default drive count, published the same price, and left every larger configuration exactly where it was. The entry price stayed real.
Quotes tell you everything up front. As of this month, every formal eRacks quote carries five things: your discounts by name, a validity window, a component-volatility note, an estimated lead time (in this market, chassis allocation is a real thing, and you deserve to know it before you order), and a configuration that matches a product we actually ship today. That last one sounds obvious. It is not industry practice.
When we cannot source a part at a price we can stand behind, we say so. Some configurations show “get a quote” instead of a number. That is not coyness. It means the market for that part is moving too fast for a printed price to stay true, so we price it fresh, with a validity window, when you ask.
Why bother
Earlier this year a prospect told us one of our configurations looked misleading. We did not enjoy hearing it, and he had a point: a stale page had drifted out of sync with the parts market. That critique turned into the system described above: automated price tracking, margin floors, re-verified defaults, and the five-line quote rule. The fix for being wrong is not better wording. It is better plumbing.
We have been building open-source servers since 1999. No venture capital, no lock-in, no per-seat fees, and nothing in the business model that needs a pricing trick to work. In a shortage, transparent pricing is slower and occasionally embarrassing. It is also the only kind worth publishing.
Configure anything, from a ZFS NAS to a private AI server, and the number you see is the number. If your workload does not fit a page, ask us and you will get a quote with all five lines on it.
joe July 20th, 2026
Posted In: News
Tags: AI server, DRAM shortage, NAS, no lock-in, Open Source, quotes, server pricing, supply chain, transparent pricing
We Re-Verified Every NAS Default Against the 2026 Drive Shortage. Here’s What Changed.
The 2026 drive and memory shortage has quietly broken a lot of storage price lists. Drives that vendors still advertise as standard are backorder-only at every national retailer. Memory prices moved 50 percent in a quarter. A configurator that hasn’t been re-checked against real supply this year is, politely, fiction.
So we re-verified our entire NAS line: every default component, checked against multiple named suppliers, for both price and actual in-stock availability. Here is what changed, and what it means if you’re shopping for storage this summer.
The 30TB drive problem
Our large NAS models used to default to the 30TB Seagate IronWolf Pro. It’s a fine drive, and it has become effectively unobtainable: backorder-only at the one national supplier still listing it, dropped from Seagate’s own current lineup, unavailable everywhere else we checked. Continuing to default to it would mean quoting systems we could not ship this week.
The fix: our high-capacity systems now default to the 24TB IronWolf Pro, in stock at multiple national retailers at about $35 per terabyte, and we added the 32TB IronWolf Pro, also in stock, at the top of the ladder at nearly the same cost per terabyte. Every drive in our NAS configurators remains CMR (conventional magnetic recording); we do not use shingled SMR drives, whose write performance collapses during the sustained writes of a RAID rebuild, exactly when you can least afford it.
ZFS RAIDZ2, now the default everywhere
Every eRacks storage system, from the 1U four-bay NAS4 to the petabyte-class NAS100, now defaults to a ZFS RAIDZ2 pool: dual parity, meaning any two drives can fail without losing data. RAIDZ3 (triple parity) and striped mirrors (the performance-first layout) are right there in the dropdown, and traditional hardware RAID remains available for shops that require it, just never as a silent default.
Under every pool is an IT-mode HBA (a host bus adapter that passes drives directly to the operating system), because ZFS wants to see raw drives to do its end-to-end checksumming and self-healing. If you’re deciding between RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3, and mirrors, our free ZFS layout guide works through the math.
Prices that match what parts cost
Component costs moved, so prices moved: mid-size and large models are repriced to current reality (the NAS12 now starts at $8,995, the NAS72 at $25,995), and every price in the configurator reflects a component list we verified we can buy this week. The entry line held: the NAS4 still starts at $1,995 and the NAS6 at $2,995, now with 16GB of DDR5 standard and ECC memory available as an upgrade.
This is the same discipline we described on our refreshed Components We Use page: new parts only, authorized US distribution, multi-source price-and-availability checks before anything gets quoted, and a 72-hour burn-in before anything ships.
Browse the re-verified line at eracks.com/products/rackmount-nas-servers, or ask us to spec one for your workload, a human answers.
joe July 9th, 2026
Tags: CMR, drive shortage, IronWolf Pro, IT-mode HBA, NAS, RAIDZ2, supply chain, transparent pricing, TrueNAS, ZFS