Purchased 5 renewed drives from amazon, 10 months in 3 have had to be replaced because of escalating bad sectors, all three were outside of the refurbish guarantee… one by only a week. Save your money and go with the new drives.
Where can you get two 16 TB HDDs for $320? Cheapest I could find was a 14TB Toshiba N300 for around $320 each and I’m on the fence about getting them because they’re supposedly pretty noisy. Were the models OP mentioned not for NAS use?
I was referring to drives like the Seagate 16TB HDD Exos X16. That said there are MDD drives that are apparently cheaper but I haven’t heard of them before.
A couple of years is a life time in tech, but despite that, I think the one thing that should be the deciding factor is if you’re actually going to need the space in the mean time. If not, waiting won’t make a difference. On the flip side, if you’re going to need it in the next couple of years anyway, then it might be easier to recognize that $320 over 2 years is less than $0.50/day… taking the initial hit and take advantage of it earlier will probably work out great.
I have been hoarding for a while now and to me storage prices really seem to have plateaued in the last few years, and it doesn’t seem to be picking up as we get back to normal after the pandemic. So I don’t think waiting for a couple years is going to save you much. Personally I’d just keep an eye out for good deals like Best Buy WD Easystore sales, or Black Friday in general, and pull the trigger then.
Black Friday is definitely a good option. I’ll also point out that WD and Seagate are working on 20TB-30TB drives that should be coming out in the next couple of years which should, in theory, drive the prices down further for smaller capacity drives.
In general, technology gets cheaper for better products over time. Short term that’s not always true, but the longer timescales you look, the better is it for consumers.
A year or two is a long time, and probably worth waiting.
In general, technology gets cheaper for better products over time. Short term that’s not always true, but the longer timescales you look, the better is it for consumers.
Yeah that’s why I linked the graph above. I asked here because I thought someone might have looked into this before and have a better insight on it. Maybe they’ve read about foretasted chip shortages or some kind of technological improvement with manufacturing? I am not sure. It’s something I only sporadically see articles about.
A year or two is a long time, and probably worth waiting.
If the price of a HDD on sale this year is equal to the average price of the same tier of HDD two or three years from now I’d probably just pull the trigger now.
There are a number of storage technologies in the works right now. However, I think they will result in a new type of memory device rather than HDDs getting cheaper. Kind of like how a stack of CDs isn’t cheaper now than it was in 2005, rather there are new types of storage that offer more memory and longer life spans.
So if you are definetly going HDD, prices are probably not going to get that much cheaper, if any cheaper at all.
I’d say keep an eye out for sales & that will probably make a bigger difference than waiting a set amount of time.
That tech looks super cool & might be worth waiting for, but from what I’ve been reading it is still being perfected and will likely see big improvements fairly quickly after release.
Heres a clip from this article I think is relevent: Teh said the new drives have double the capacity of storage systems using conventional 16TB perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) drives, and this can be doubled again over the next four years. The company is projecting 4TB platters in the next couple of years, with 5TB coming shortly thereafter, and 6TB out beyond the current roadmap.
So there’s a chance you wait for those drives, pay a little extra cuz the tech is new, then have something twice as good get released a year or two later.
It’s definetly a tricky situation & ultimately up to you and what you want. Do you need that extra storage asap, or is it more of a eventually kind thing? Does new tech have its own intrinsic value to you, or is it more about price per terabyte?
Good luck with your decision! I know how hard these kind of choices can be. You never know what the market will look like after you finally make that big purchase.
Waiting can be good if there is something on the horizon, but often with tech if you wait for the next thing you’ll find there’s another new thing on the horizon then. You do kind of have to decide that you’re putting your stake in the ground at some point
My stake is really that 30 TB mark. That should be enough to consolidate all my storage conveniently in one spot. I don’t need incredibly fast transfer speeds so I think an HDD would do fine.
Then whenever you’re ready. Just do a table of price per TB and go then. Best Buy usually has WD Elements on sale every other week where you can pick up an external for cheaper, then just shuck it and you get a WD red or white you can just pop into your NAS. I did 16TBs not too long ago and they were the cheapest per TB
RAID is your friend. If you can’t afford to lose one, you might have a bad time (applies to all drives anyway). Manufacturer refurbs are your best bet.
I’ve been using renewed (refurbished) 8TB drives off of Ebay - SAS 8TB for $50-60 each. Not a single failure in over a year on the dozen or so drives I’m running right now. I’m running unRAID with a combination of unRAID’s native array drives (for media and “disposable” stuff) in a dual parity config, and ZFS (with snapshots replicated to a live backup on a secondary server) for important personal stuff (and backed-up off-site a few times a year).
Even if something were to perish, I have enough spares to just chuck one in and let it resilver without worrying at all. I’m content with this as a homelabber and when I’m not supplying critical service for a business, etc.
I’ve not heard any out-and-out horror stories, but I’ve got no first hand experience.
I’m planning on picking up 3x manufacturer recertified 18TB drives from SPD when money allows, but for now I’m running 6x ancient (minimum 4 years old) 3TB WD Reds in RAID 6. I keep a close eye on SMART stats, and can pick up a replacement within a day if something starts to look iffy. My plan is to treat the 18TBs the same; hard drives are consumables, they wear out over time, and you have to be ready to replace them when they do
As soon as I heard about the emulator stuff I grabbed some archive torrents to seed overall more then 5 tb. All WII DS 3DS and SWITCH roms so they aren’t gone if you have the space to join seeding pm me and I’ll send you the magnet links because there are like only 5 seeder and a lot of leecher
I’m running several used (“renewed”) enterprise SAS HDDs and enterprise SATA SSDs. They’ve been solid so far.
The HDDs came with about 30k hours each which is not bad at all, and the SSDs only had around 100 TB written out of the total 6.2 PB rating.
I’m not sure I would do used with standard consumer HDDs, they typically don’t last as long and are likely abused a lot more in a desktop PC vs a datacenter server.
As always have proper backups in place, all drives fail eventually no matter where you buy them.
Depends on how much you value your data and how much redundancy you have. I bought a 20tb “manufacturer certified” drive from SPD the other day and it tests fine, but I’m not going to put valuable data on it. Maybe if this drive outlives my shucked easy stores I’ll buy more. But for now my main raid array is new drives only that I’ve throughly tested before installing.
Sounds like the term used by Amazon? I picked up eight 18TB “renewed” drives that have been in constant use for over a year now under a ZFS filesystem. Not a single error yet and the pool is about half full. At the time I bought them, they were about $100 cheaper (each) than brand new drives so that saved me quite a bit of money, but they were also a fairly new line of drives so there couldn’t have been much previous use on them anyway.
At one point, I found a complete set of ROMs for every single game on retroachievements.com. It’s almost assuredly out of date by now, and I’m not saying it would have every single Vimm ROM…. But there would be a lot of overlap. If any are already wiped from Vimm and nobody has a backup, let me know and I’ll do some digging to see if I have anything comparable.
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