I need some more storage for my NAS/virtualization server. Where should I buy drives from that I don’t get fucked up the ass for money? $120 for a 4TB disk, wow. I don’t mind paying it if I have to, but am I missing something?
Where should I get cheaper drives from, or is that just what I have to accept?
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Dude just get 4TB WD blues from Amazon for $99 a pop.
That's cheap as fuck, and buying used hard drives is just asking for failures.
When placed in a 24-7 server, desktop HDDs fail 14 times more often than enterprise HDDs.
That’s not server drives though. Those will fail on me. I’m not looking to skimp, but I’m also trying to avoid my wallet getting jewed.
I buy 3tb Hitachi drives for 55$ off ebay. I sue them for archival purposes and keep duplicates of all data just in case. I don't know about servers though, I've never built a server with raid.
Yeah that’s the problem, I use it for tons of always-available storage so I can’t get eBay drives. I’ve used almost all of my measly 3TB so I need more but I don’t want to spend close to $250 just for a simple 4TB mirrored RAID.
if you don't need a lot of space. I see no harm in setting up a NAS using a bunch of $20 300GB harddrives in RAID. They'll store all of your pictures, family videos, and work/tax documents
OK and? Make backups.
If they're just drives for your own use, you don't need enterprise grade 24/7 drives designed for continuous access.
>I use it for tons of always-available storage so I can’t get eBay drives
Sure you can. I buy refurb HGST 3TBs off Newegg for about the same price as that other user. I've had half a dozen of then for a few years. They're in a ZFS array that's scrubbed weekly and they've never given me the slightest bit of trouble.
You apparently know that you need to use redundancy and keep backups, which implies that you're aware of the fact that any drive, new or used, of any make or model, can die at any time with no warning. So given that, there's no reason not to buy refurb drives if they're cheaper per-terabyte.
Backups with what? More drives? You can’t even enable RAID on WD blues. Why would I buy something that’s going to fail and make me buy a new one later on much quicker than one that’s rated for my usage?
>same price as that other user
Do you mean the $100 one? That’s only $20 cheaper than a brand new HGST that has the manufacturer warranty. I’m not trying to be an asshole but how is that cheap for 3TB?
No, I meant $55-$60 for refurb 3TBs.
I’ll check there then. Thanks user. I don’t mind refurb, didn’t mean to imply that. I just don’t buy straight up used drives off eBay that aren’t certified.
I want to expand my storage since I’m getting into data hoarding (I share with my family and friends often, movies and software etc) and so I’m starting to run out of space, but don’t want to be wrecked by price demands. I’m alright with doing backups regularly to compensate as long as I have everything I need for my space needs.
Why can't you raid with WD Blues?
Well you can, but it might blow up. The short version is that blues assume that they're the only drive in the system, and thus are willing to try, retry, and retry again if they come across a sector they can't read. In a non-RAID system the user would see this as a disk access taking an abnormally long time for some reason. Many RAID implementations, though, would see a drive that hasn't gotten back to them after several seconds after a read request, assume its died or otherwise faulted, and then boot it from the array. Despite the fact that it may well be fine, just taking its damn sweet time trying to satisfy a read of a dodgy sector. Pretty much the only difference between "certified for RAID" drives and these (aside from some default power-saving and spindown settings) is that RAID drives will fail a read that they can't satisfy quickly, assuming the controller or software can handle that. The magic term to search for for more information is "TLER", or time-limited error recovery.
Note that whether this is a problem depends on how the RAID implementation reacts, Linux MD-RAID, Btrfs, and ZFS are all different here. I think at least some have tunables to adjust how long they'll wait for a drive before assuming the worst.
If you don't care about a warranty, why not shuck drives ?
8TB easystore WD external drives are $160 at bestbuy right now
I thought you were in practice no longer getting reds in those things, and in theory not guaranteed anything about the drive inside. leading to a situation where you might shuck the thing, find some shitty shingled drive inside, and then be unable to return it.
its still the best value per tb, also shingled is a seagate thing not WD iirc
shingled is fine for most users/use cases on here.
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What are you comparing that price to?
Or does it seem arbitrarily expensive to you?
It’s just expensive. I hate paying the “enterprise” tax like a good goy
not really. if you don't use them constantly and let them spin down they'll last a decade + easily
Large storage hdds are still shut. Had 2 of my 3 Toshiba 5tb 3.5 rivets corrupt or fail to save backups on partitions
got a bunch of new 4tb sas drives for 90 ozbucks each just a while back on our equivalent of craigslist. i recommend 2nd hand enterprise stuff as it's cheap and a buyers market. make sure you have enough redundancy and you'll be fine (raid z2 here), drives fail, prepare for it then just get whatever cheap second hand stuff you can.
if i remember rightly blues are just the same hardware as reds but with different firmware, and there are tools to change the firmware.