It's been a year since prices recovered from the earlier madness & got back to where they were. It's not totally stable, but prices as I see them have been going slowly down since.

I personally have some Exos 16TB's. There's a decent price history available[1] reaching back to mid-2019. Make sure to tick on "3rd party new". These aren't going to be the best prices available in many cases, but it's reasonably indicative.

[1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07SPFPKF4

I always buy enterprise drives - much higher reliability and lifetime and usually I have found they benchmark higher. They are also way heavier and almost always use better bearings on all surfaces. Some people complain they are super loud but the three types I have randomly purchased over the years have been just as quiet as any other spinning disk (as in I do not notice the sound at all once its inside my desktop)

This is my pain point. For those of us who are aware the cloud exists and would rather do tape anyway, why on earth is a recent vintage tape drive so expensive?

I was talking spinning disks - tape is too niche now