Wow I had already forgotten completely about this. I thought some of the memes would endure… But alas, it was not meant to be.

Inertia is a hell of a thing, like the saying “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”. Or the Cisco tax.

Good, hopefully the brain drain continues at Intel so the competition increases

And the situation where I need to restore more then 8tb would be when I lost all my original data, and the backup NAS itself.

If that happens I’m not worrying about spending $280.

I’m not sure about the iscsi protocol. They allow VMs, including harddrives via USB, so the point of doing this making it more expensive does not apply considering someone could just hook up 100tb+ of USB drives and still be clear under the TOS.

If they did have a problem with this I would just do that instead.

I use the unlimited consumer backblaze with private key on a windows VM. I provision a 40tb iscsi connection to the VM from a NAS and all kinds of various homelab systems and devices store thier backups there. Works great and is the cheapest possible option at $9 a month.