What you might think is “common sense” may not be for others. There is value in this being documented, otherwise the person without “common sense” may be influenced by someone with an agenda who does document their thoughts.

Same as when people make fun of “obvious” research, there is value in having it peer reviewed as a reference for future researchers.

Have they actually gone up that much? Oraybe just specific models? I just bought a 12TB NAS drive on Black Friday and the price difference was less than $20 compared to when I tried to do the exact same thing the year before.