This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Allen Cooley, photographer, director, and founder of Allen Cooley Photography, a commercial, beauty, and portrait studio based in Atlanta, Georgia. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been working professionally as a photographer since about 2006, and for most of my career, I barely had to think about the price of hard drives. They were a basic cost of doing business.

Now, I have to be strategic about every drive I buy.

I started noticing a spike in hard drive prices toward the end of 2025. When I went back through my receipts, I found that I'd paid $400 for a 4-terabyte drive in 2022. Today, a comparable drive costs around $1,200.

When I tallied up what I'd paid in 2025 for drives, it was over $20,000. That's why I stopped buying them entirely this year.

Luckily, I've accumulated hundreds of hard drives over my career. Every new job, I'd simply buy a few more. So, 20 years and thousands of jobs later, I've become something of a hard-drive hoarder — and that habit is finally paying off.

How I used AI to solve my problem

Commercial photography requires a lot of storage. I usually need three or four portable drives for a job, and sometimes as many as five or six. And because a client might come back three years later to renew the assets, I have to keep the files long after a shoot is over.

On a recent campaign that involved both video and still photography, buying that amount of new drives would have cost me $4,000 to $5,000.

That was money I didn't want to spend.

So, I used Claude to help me build a program that catalogs what's stored across my drives. Now, I can search for a file, find every drive that contains a copy, and figure out what I can safely delete to free up space.

Instead of manually organizing hundreds of drives, I can essentially have a conversation with my archive. It's saved me days, if not weeks, worth of work.

The irony isn't lost on me: I believe demand from the data centers powering AI is one reason storage has gotten so expensive, and then I turn around and use Claude to help me avoid spending thousands of dollars on new drives.

I don't know how long I can avoid buying more drives

How long I can keep avoiding new hard drives depends on how much work comes in.

If I'm shooting only still photography, I can probably keep this going for a while. Video is different. I'm primarily hired to shoot video and stills together, and those jobs require so much storage that eventually I'll need more drives.

Also, my business is down about 30% from its peak in 2023. Last year was particularly rough, and this year has been roughly flat compared with last year.

I don't blame all of that on the advertising industry. Earlier in my career, I worked 10- or 13-hour days, answered emails at midnight and on weekends, and made myself extraordinarily accessible.

Now I have two young daughters, and I'm more likely to spend my time at a soccer game or taking one of them somewhere. So when I look at that decline, I know some of it reflects a choice I've made to spend less time working.

Still, I'm watching the industry closely.

The cost of doing business has gone up while, in my experience, companies and agencies are reallocating their budgets or spending less on some traditional photography and advertising work.

I also don't expect hard-drive prices simply to return to what I was used to paying. My guess is that eventually another manufacturer could step in to serve consumers who need cheaper storage.

Until then, I'm going to keep being resourceful with what I have. If work picks up, I'll probably have to start buying drives again. If it doesn't, I can make these hundreds of old drives last a lot longer.