I don’t trust shipping internationally.

It’s the only way I can get anything, and it can and will go badly, but it is what it is. Currently dealing with returning the wrong version of a pixel 8 pro via Amazon, all the way from Honduras. Amazon’s outsourced CS from India doesn’t help one bit, those guys don’t read for shit. We have one advantage, though, there’s some legal Grey area thingy going on in Honduras and we can import and pay simply based on weight or volume. Like $0.80 per pound if shipped via water. No import fees, even though we should be paying them (and last I checked, they’re high). Gotta love third world countries, amirite?

SSDs are only 2 times more expensive […] and that makes it worth it for me given all the advantages the offer.

Speaking as someone from Honduras, 2-3x the price for the same functionality, specifically if it’s going to a NAS, doesn’t cut it for me. HDDs are reliable and cheap enough that, if you have the physical space, they make the most sense, and if you need the extra speed, you throw a couple of SSDs in raid 1 for caching. Maybe if you’re going for a smaller-sized NAS, and especially if you’re going to do stuff like video editing off it, SSDs make sense. For my needs, which is mostly data hoarding/photo editing/content serving through plex or jellyfin, I want the most space and can accept gigabit speeds (although an SSD cache would alleviate speed constraints if I wanted more than gigabit speeds).

Of course, if you’re not aiming to build or maintain a NAS, absolutely don’t go for an HDD in 2023. That’s probably the same advice I’d give anyone if they’d asked me in the past 5 to 8 years, though.