A lot of people look at hard drives as a "thing". You get a bunch of them, put them in a box, sell them on eBay, and voila- money. That's a bad, bad way to look at things....
The value of hard drives will always exist as long as computers that are being refurbished need them. A lot of the reason I buy parts here from SMF members is to put them into systems I'm assembling. The profit margins on reselling parts doesn't pan out- the reason is simple. If I'm a recycler who makes his money on inbound E-Waste, I can always sell parts for less than someone who's re-handling them. It's simple- every time someone touches an item, they have to make money. More people touching stuff means it just doesn't pan out. A hard drive going into a whole machine is different- if I can buy the part for less than the cost of buying it retail, it's a win. As long as systems need hard drives, there's value.
I don't think machines will do away with replaceable storage. Apple has, but remember- in our industry, we mostly work with Dell, HP, Lenovo, .... These machines need to have everything replaceable and upgrade-able to meet the demands of the companies that buy them. I think the days of the traditional platter-style hard drive are numbered. My main office computer has an M.2 SSD. It's about the size of a stick of laptop RAM, and can hold 1TB. It's a lot more reliable too. The day will come when SSDs will be king. It's not that far around the corner....
So, if I buy a $14k machine (Let's pretend that I could do that), it can't even wipe M.2 drives or MSATA ones (Though MSATA is a rare sight anyways). So, in a few years, it's junk. In the mean time, the cost of licensing the darned thing would mean that I'd be money ahead to just stop buying hard drives from you guys, and buy them from eBay resellers. Or.... I could use a cheap system that's just as reliable: Desktop PCs. We've all got loads of 'em!
Going to a server has it's advantages. You can buy a SATA power and data extender cable for cheap, and then run that into a homemade enclosure bay (Just get some wood and make bays and put one cable set in each)- you're basically using your server like a computer with 12, 16, or 24 SATA ports. You'd save a lot of space, and it should be easy to get powerful hardware that can handle that many drives. You might save on the power bill too. There are a couple things I don't like: If one of my machines crashes, I lose 4 hard drives. I'd much rather eat the cost of four drives than 24. Also, with Secure Erase, I can't do anything with a machine if any of the drives are still wiping. So, if I put 3 drives that are 250GB each in, and one that's a 2TB drive, I'll have a machine tied up wiping the one massive drive while the three little ones should be on the shelf, and more drives should be wiping. I can configure different machines to wipe whatever I need at the moment.
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