While the article mentions that it’s mostly enterprise grade hard drives that are becoming more expensive, nonetheless it’s also affecting consumer-level hardware – in addition to memory and GPUs becoming difficult to afford for anyone wishing to just play computer games or create human-made content.
And even worse Chia is most likely what caused the glut of counterfeit Seatgate “new” drives that flooded the market.
For those that weren’t aware, after Chia basically failed, all the miners took the drives, edited their SMART values and sold them as new. This also caused massive hit to Seagate’s reliability metrics because so many “new” drives of theirs were failing.
The ended up discovering and shutting the operation down and have locked down their new and refurbished channels to try to reduce counterfeiting.