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maxgrav @alien.top

2y ago

Big disk win, what do you think?

Just picked up 17 x 1-TB HDDs at $120 total on craigslist. All WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

What do we think?

8 comments

That sounds like a pain in the ass. It's a decent $/TB ratio, but that's still 17 disks

Sounds like a big win for the seller at face value.
What do the crystal disk stats look like for the drives?

From a price point of view that was not a good deal in terms of $/TB, but, if you need a lot of throughput you can easily create a 17 disk RAID6 array, but this requires an LFF storage system that can handle these many drives. Do you have such a system already or what was the idea to buy this many 1TB drives? Can you elaborate more?
- I don't plan to run them all simultaneously. I'll have 3 data sets:
  My main storage 1 TB, with a syncing copy of the whole TB on another machine and 1 offline copy updated perhaps every few months.
  My family photos and videos, allocating 1 TB to the photographer of the family, with a synced copy attached to a digital photo frame.
  My home video media server hosted on a cloud storage app I wrote myself. I probably won't put in any redundancy for that set and will focus on size.
  I haven't learned RAID yet, but will sometime.

That's a lot of drives to, er, drive. Lots of power and space to accommodate. Good for redundancy and resilience though. Would you install all or keep some on a shelf as cold spares?
You can get far more bytes for your money with larger drives of course, but those wouldn't have the flexibility you have with the 17 drives.
How are you intending to use them?

Sorry to chime in on the negative comments but it's not a good deal. 17x7 Watt = ~120 Watt, that's around what my entire home setup uses, including storage.
- That was my thought too. Power efficiency is a big factor to consider when hosting any permanently online self hosted solution. It just doesn't add up right when going for smaller hard drives anymore.
  
  Makes sense! Interestingly, my power is free in Hawaii.

8 comments