8 TB Hard Drive – More for Less

I don’t understand this at all, the economics of hard drive pricing are all screwed up.  I recently bought a couple of 8 terabyte Seagate external desktop drives for less than $170 each.  Checking now the price is back up to $205, but my point still stands: This external drive contains a bare drive that sells for $230.

That’s the Seagate Archive HDD (model ST8000AS0002) Here it is freed from it’s plastic prison:
So for $25 bucks less (current prices) you get a bunch of extra plastic, a USB interface, cable and power supply plus a whole lot more packaging.  How does this make sense?
The good news is that it’s very simple to pry open these external drives and pop the drive out (I used a letter opener) and there are no stickers you have to break to cancel the warranty, so if you do run into an issue you can simply drop the bare drive back into the case and make your warranty claim.
I’m using these drives in a synology NAS, so I don’t need all the extra plastic and interface, but it was sure worth the more than $100 bucks in savings to have to pry them open so I’m not complaining, I’m just curious how this even makes sense and why prices would be so screwy even without a big sale.