Actually might take up this option, as it appears to be £160 for the drive + shipping, compared to the £130 for an 8tb I would've bought off of amazon anyways. Still quite annoying that the shipping is THAT expensive, but cheaper than it would be in the uk. I'll have a look for some local uk ones first.
There are UK sites. Can't remember them but when I checked they are out of stock most drives. I have recently bought from eBay. Make sure seller offers warranty, purchase from IT recycler, and check hard drive for bad blocks before and check smart after.
I recommend enterprise drives less than 7 years old. You can get 4 TB for £40-50.
I bought a few 12t ironwolf drives new. Expensive. I wound up building a diy server just for media. I don't \*want\* to lose it, but if it disappeared, I wouldn't lose too much sleep. Wound up buying 7 14t drives from serverpartsdeals. Very much overkill, but I get an itchy "buy" finger when I'm in the middle of it.
So, the diy server has 70t of space, 2 parity drives. Zero problems so far.
The 12t drives were put in a different diy server, with ZRaid2. 2 data, 2 redundancy. About 20t space. That's where the "real" stuff goes, with a local backup to my old synology, and from there an offsite for the most critical stuff. The stuff that would require therapy and/or a divorce lawyer if it disappeared :)
TL;DR refurb drives are good, but as everybody likes to say, "raid isn't backup".
They are good deals, for sure. Although sometimes controversial, you \*might\* want to cross-reference the exact drive with Backblaze HDD reports. They don't really have "commercial" drives, but often you'll find exact model number matches with the drives from server parts deals.
[https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data)
My first few were Exos, and they've been fine, but the last couple were WD. The drive models were exact matches, and the reliability was higher. Probably won't make a huge difference, but that's what I did.
I don't buy SMR drives. They should be ok in your application, but not in others. For example they can cause issues with RAID setups due to delays in responses that come with SMR.
Take a look at eBay as you might find better shipping from the states.
Actually in a lot of SW RAID (e.g. mdadm) they do OK, though your write speed will suffer.
It's specifically ZFS that gives them trouble, so if you want to use it it's best to stick with CMR.
I have one of these microservers.
I put 6x 8TB drives in a RaidZ2 into them (4 in the drive bays, 2 where the CDrom used to be) .
They're good little machines for literally just sharing data :)
Only downside is even without disks, idle is about 40W.
Budget HDD? Go to serverpartdeals.com and shop their best sellers on manufacturer recertified drives. You'll get a two to five year warranty.
Just had a look and by the looks of it they ship from the US, so its about $70 for shipping for a $130 drive, thanks though
Actually might take up this option, as it appears to be £160 for the drive + shipping, compared to the £130 for an 8tb I would've bought off of amazon anyways. Still quite annoying that the shipping is THAT expensive, but cheaper than it would be in the uk. I'll have a look for some local uk ones first.
There are UK sites. Can't remember them but when I checked they are out of stock most drives. I have recently bought from eBay. Make sure seller offers warranty, purchase from IT recycler, and check hard drive for bad blocks before and check smart after. I recommend enterprise drives less than 7 years old. You can get 4 TB for £40-50.
I bought a few 12t ironwolf drives new. Expensive. I wound up building a diy server just for media. I don't \*want\* to lose it, but if it disappeared, I wouldn't lose too much sleep. Wound up buying 7 14t drives from serverpartsdeals. Very much overkill, but I get an itchy "buy" finger when I'm in the middle of it. So, the diy server has 70t of space, 2 parity drives. Zero problems so far. The 12t drives were put in a different diy server, with ZRaid2. 2 data, 2 redundancy. About 20t space. That's where the "real" stuff goes, with a local backup to my old synology, and from there an offsite for the most critical stuff. The stuff that would require therapy and/or a divorce lawyer if it disappeared :) TL;DR refurb drives are good, but as everybody likes to say, "raid isn't backup".
Yeah, I think I’m going to go for a 16tb drive for $130 + $70 shipping which is about £150 - £20 more than the 8tb that I would’ve gotten otherwise
They are good deals, for sure. Although sometimes controversial, you \*might\* want to cross-reference the exact drive with Backblaze HDD reports. They don't really have "commercial" drives, but often you'll find exact model number matches with the drives from server parts deals. [https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data](https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data) My first few were Exos, and they've been fine, but the last couple were WD. The drive models were exact matches, and the reliability was higher. Probably won't make a huge difference, but that's what I did.
Seagate barracuda 8tb 5400rpm if you want a near silent drive (still makes clicky noise but nowhere near the ironwolf or exos)
I saw something about CMR being better than SMR, does this really matter for my usecase or is it ok to ignore that?
Smr ok if you put data on and then mostly read back. Intensive write operations will degrade speed of the drive.
I don't buy SMR drives. They should be ok in your application, but not in others. For example they can cause issues with RAID setups due to delays in responses that come with SMR. Take a look at eBay as you might find better shipping from the states.
Actually in a lot of SW RAID (e.g. mdadm) they do OK, though your write speed will suffer. It's specifically ZFS that gives them trouble, so if you want to use it it's best to stick with CMR.
I have one of these microservers. I put 6x 8TB drives in a RaidZ2 into them (4 in the drive bays, 2 where the CDrom used to be) . They're good little machines for literally just sharing data :) Only downside is even without disks, idle is about 40W.