Substantial price increases for SAS controllers and Mallanox NICs?

[Lebowski89]

Hey all,

 

In 2020, during the pandemic I embarked on a project to rid myself of my consumer router (Netgear R7000) and NAS (Synology DS415+) in exchange for an Unraid Server/Gaming machine (game in a Windows VM on Unraid ) attached to a 16bay DAS/pfsense server (both being in Lian Li PC-P80 cases). If you remember those months, you'll remember that prices for things like GPUs and Ryzen X570 motherboards were through the roof. Well.. using ebay, I nabbed a few Mallanox CX312A and a LSI SAS 9200-16E 16-Port 6Gb/s card. The build went great, and continues to run great today. Things are strange when it comes to Mallanox and 9200-16E prices where I am (Australia) at the moment, though. Everything else, like CPUs, GPUs, Motherboards, have had substantial price decreases in the past year, but the 9200-16E for example, has gone up from the 60-70AUD mark in 2020 (I paid 69AUD), to well over $140. Now I know this is the second hand market and prices can fluctuate, but even when I look at Chinese based sellers, the prices are just up everywhere. Has there been a shortage of Mallanox NICs and SAS cards? Or are more people just getting into building their own servers, DAS, and routers?

 

(I want to chuck another 9200-16E card into a secondary PC, so it can enjoy the benefits of the DAS (have a whole bunch of bays that are just not being used that I could use for other PCs), but it is hard paying nearly double what I did two years ago..)