I’m sketching the idea of building a NAS in my home, using a USB RAID enclosure (which may eventually turn into a proper NAS enclosure).

I haven’t got the enclosure yet but that’s not that big of a deal, right now I’m thinking whether to buy HDDs for the storage (currently have none) to setup RAID, but I cannot find good deals on HDDs.

I found on reddit that people were buying high capacity drives for as low as $15/TB, e.g. paying $100 for 10/12TB drives, but nowadays it’s just impossible to find drives at a bargain price, thanks to AI datacenters, I guess.

In Europe I’ve heard of datablocks.dev where you can buy white-label or recertified Seagate disks, sometimes you can find refurbished drives in eBay, but I can’t find these bargain deals everyone seemed to have up until last year?

For example, is 134 EUR for a 6TB refurbished Toshiba HDD a good price, considering the price hikes? What price per TB should I be looking for to consider the drives cheap? Where else can I search for these cheap drives?

  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    13 hours ago

    Supposedly SATA controllers are also not built for the abuse I have been throwing them in my machines, and I don’t want to push it.

    what makes you say that?

    • SpikesOtherDog@ani.socialEnglish
      2·
      10 hours ago

      I just read that recently. Let me see if I can run that source back down.

      Edit: All in one CompTIA server plus certification exam guide second edition exam SK0-005 McGraw-Hill Daniel LaChance 2021 Page 138. In the table there it says that SATA is not designing for constant use.

      Edit 2:

      https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/sas-vs-sata

      Reliability:

      SAS: Designed for 24/7 operation with higher >mean time between failures (MTBF), often 1.6 million hours or more
SATA: Suitable for regular use but not as robust as SAS for constant, heavy workloads, with MTBF typically around 1.2 million hour

      They are saying that SAS is a better option with a longer MTBF, but I don’t expect my drives to last 5 years, much less 136.

      My own two cents here is that you probably don’t want to use SATA ZFS JBOD in an enterprise environment, but that’s more based on enterprise lifecycle management than utility.