>Because 1EB is a minuscule amount of the hard drive capacity

Very much agree here. I purchased about 144TB of raw storage a few weeks ago for future video and data projects, and it's possible to purchase 1PB of raw capacity (with no redundancy, nor anything to connect to) for as cheap as around $13000 USD at retail pricing.

1EB could be acquired for somewhere between $12-$15M. Not chump change, but considering the number of players pre-mining, absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

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What will be interesting is how this increase in mainnet capacity grows over time, and relative to manufactured capacity. 1.1EB of footprint today is nothing ... but we might start to care if it were to grow at a rate of 1.1EB/day or faster, as manufacturers like Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc. can't instantly respond to such a sustained demand spike. Channel supply could be exhausted relatively quickly.

The difference in consumer storage prices today compared to a few weeks ago is pretty substantial, and that’s when you can find it in stock at all.

HDDs have been hit much harder than SSDs, but I’m guessing you didn’t buy 144 TB of SSDs.

To be fair, enterprise SSDs (particularly U.2, U.3 and E.1L) have had their own availability issues for a fair bit now, particularly the latest NVMe PCIe Gen 4 devices. However, the problem there isn't cryptocurrency, but hyperscalers having had exclusive periods to buy directly from the manufacturers. Which they have. At immense scale. Some drives announced nearly a year ago are only now hitting the retail and VAR channels.

High-speed DDR4 ECC memory (DDR-3200 in particular) can also be tough to come by. A fair number of VARs actually limit quantity (usually to 20 modules per SKU), since it's so tough to get. Again, not due to crypto mining, but because of hyperscalers.

It's just a spike, the price will come back down quickly as total stored space increases and makes further "farming" even less competitive. Just consider how quickly the projected rewards are dropping, e.g. at https://chiacalculator.com/ or the XCH/TiB chart at https://www.chiaexplorer.com/charts/xchTib (same site as OP).

1. Exponential growth.

2. Started with around 120 PByte. Seven weeks later and it'll be already a decimal order of magnitude bigger.

0.1 percent isn't minuscule.