Comment on How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS?
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise. Massive price gouging going on with all storage pre-sold based on IOUs to “AI” companies.
If you must…
Buy used enterprise drives with a ~5 year warranty. In US there is serverpartdeals and goharddrives. I am not sure of the Europe equivalents but I am sure they exist. The enterprise drives should be cheaper than new drives and will last longer; they’ve been used out of their early failure bathtub curve but they’re young enough to be given a 5 year warranty. Make sure to get ones with SATA connectors not SAS, you’ll need a PCIe card to talk to the SAS ones, and maybe something for power idk.
They should be cheaper - I am not sure if price uncertainty has upended that.
Enterprise drives are louder, I have them in a quiet case with sound dampening padding (fractal define) and I do not hear them 5 feet away.
I have heard bad things about consumer drives longevity. I used several 1 TB barracudas for years with no issues in a server setting, I used 3 TB barracudas in a server setting and one failed early. I used a 4 TB Toshiba that failed early and I used an 8 TB blue that is fine in a personal computing setting. I have bought enterprise drives and none have an issue yet.
It seems luck of the draw, so the thing to maximize is cheapest per GB.
I know it is a bad time but I planned to stick with my normal external consumer harddrive for another year at least. Should I wait and just hook up an external USB drive to my RPi and use it as a samba share for backups?
I checked for used enterprise drives but I didn’t find anything with SATA for a reasonable price yet, unfortunately.
Consumer is fine then, cheapest you can.
You can def wait, but do the over-under with what you can pay. External drives, even if shucked, seem to be the lowest quality drives and die earliest. May be better to get real drives now, even with inflated costs.
Make sure you get a drive for backup. Extra layout up front but worth it. I’d recc 1 data drive + 1 backup drive over just 2 raid1 data drives any day.
Yes I will definitely get a CMR drive, I read enough comments warning me about SMR lol
Yeah I should probably get a little bit extra money in hand but buy something good instead of some garbage.
Would you consider that better even if the backup drive is in the same house as the data drive, just powered off?
Backup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.
For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.
Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.
Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise
It’s a bit of a gamble, isn’t it? At least here, HDDs appear to have gone up 10-20% compared to lowest prices last year, which isn’t that much compared to SSDs and RAM. Personally I bought new disks last week just in case the prices continue to rise and I don’t want to end up in a position where I have to buy new disks while they’re at an all time high.
It is a gamble, fuck the AI bozos for speculating us into economic uncertainty
@fhein @glizzyguzzler two me about it, o just spent about twice what I was expecting on an ssd NAS build
F in the chat for your savings, least you’ve got the peak of home NASes. Pretty fuckin cool and I hold out hope when the drop comes in a… 6 months to 3 years…? that I’ll be able to afford full SSD NAS life. The power savings, the speed, the no worries of shock or vibrations, the silence - jealous
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
I recommend against Go Hard Drives. They get drives that previously failed but currently test ok, then wipe the SMART data. I had a whopping 133% failure rate (all 3 original, plus 1 replacement) before I returned the whole thing.
If you insist on using them, do the most extensive burn-in testing you possibly can. I would use at least a full week, to make sure it’s actually (semi-) reliable.
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I got several from them and they’ve been fine for a year now - and theoretically have a 5 year warranty from them too. So worked out for me to save some cash! Buuuut if they do end up failing, it’s gonna be a hassle to get replacements for sure