> e hardware costs and the operation costs should all have dropped between 2x and 5x
That would work if they fully recouped the costs of obtaining and running the drives, including racks, PSUs, cases, drive and PSU replacements, control boards, datacenter/whatever costs, electricity, HVAC etc. and generated a solid profit not only to buy all the new hardware but a new yacht for the owners too.
But usually that is not how it works, because the nobody sane buys the hardware with the cash. And even if they have a new fancy 240TB/rack units, that doesn't mean they just migrated outright and threw the old ones ASAP.
So while there is a 5x lower costs per U for the new rack unit, it doesn't translate to 5x lower cost of storage for the sell.
I would sure hope the original units were recouped after 8 years.
You can look at their stats and see that the very vast majority of their data is on 12-16TB drives, and most of the rest is on 8TB drives. Even with those not being the very newest and cheapest models, their average server today is a lot denser and cheaper than their brand new servers 8 years ago.
Inflation is not even close to that level.
And those hardware costs already take into account inflation up through the end of 2022.