expired Posted by tDames | Staff • Oct 24, 2023
Oct 24, 2023 2:53 PM
Item 1 of 1
expired Posted by tDames | Staff • Oct 24, 2023
Oct 24, 2023 2:53 PM
18TB Dell Exos X18 SATA 3.5" Internal Hard Drive (Refurbished)
+ Free Shipping$162
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Also note that these are manufactured by Seagate.
Doubt anybody here is really discussing the deal because they want to put a 18TB game archive drive in their PC, though. We build storage systems for other reasons:
Juggling lots of different disks becomes a PITA. It's more convenient to set up a storage pool where you don't necessarily have to care about which drive holds the data. You can just worry about the pool as an entity itself.
There are downsides to "easy" cloud storage, like privacy concerns, keeping track of data in many different places, unknown how well your cloud storage providers back up your data, and cost.
If you had a backup in place, you'd probably be down for a really long time during the recovery process. For some people that's not acceptable.
Also, at some point higher density storage starts demanding a premium. So if you want to keep costs down and you have physical space, smaller drives might be a better solution. If you work in IT, you can often get hard drives for free when they get cycled out of production. Though relatively few of us work in places where 18TB drives are too small or too old for the business case.
There's also a skills component to consider. If you work in IT and want to upskill, you need a home lab to learn and practice with. Setting up and maintaining large storage systems is a good skill to have. And those systems can also be the foundation for other things like virtualization, containerization, new operating systems, disaster recovery, hybrid cloud, etc.
Those are most of the reasons you see folks here seeking out cheap, large drives. Probably 99% of households don't have a need for 18TB. If you're not in tech you really only accumulate that much if you are hording media files or you work in some kind of media production.
You might also be a solopreneur, I suppose. I have two laptops I consider critical in my house. I can roll back to the previous 7 days, I've got 3 weekly snapshopts beyond that, and 3 monthly snapshots further back. That backup strategy uses about 1TB per machine.
For all of these use cases, you're building storage on multiple drives. We can see a big cost savings by buying refurb and we can help mitigate the "risk" of used drives with these systems.
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You mention the other option is a DAS, but a good external enclosure with high speed connection is going to cost quite a bit of money if you can't fit them in the main rig. The DAS would probably cost more upfront, and then you'd need to manage the raid either with a built in capability (slower) or directly in your OS (storage spaces if windows). I personally love storage spaces, so that's what I would do in this scenario. Takes the network out of the equation as a bottleneck for your Plex server.
So my vote would be DAS to your main Plex rig using something like this https://www.amazon.com/Mediasonic...B0
I used the 8 bay version in this exact setup before along with storage spaces to feed into my plex server. Eventually I upgraded my case to get all the disks internal so I didn't need the separate box.
Anecdotally, I have primarily used WD drives for the last 10 years or so, all purchased new, and so far, I have had 4 disc failures all WD (2 blue, 1 green, 1 black). 1 Seagate and 1 Hitachi I also owned during this period are still going strong.
EDIT: btw, this disc has been the same price and has been in stock for over a month, however this is seller refurb and dell branded (diff firmware) vs exos x18 they also list which is manuf refurb, but $10 higher.
Back in the day (around 10 years ago), I had 4 Red, er, uh, cough, cough, Green drives fail in 24 hours of receipt, tested, and placed into a couple Synology NAS boxes. You could query the drive's firmware and it would come back as "Green".... This is going back a long time, but early adopters like me had drives shitting the bed all over the place...
WD is sleazy at the core, and we should all remember that....
I still use their products daily and have at least 100-130+TBs around me now, because we really don't have much choice any more....
I have drives in use I wasn't counting... Time for me to get a clue...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoar...o_on
If 10TB is fine for your needs, this HGST drive from MDD [amazon.com] came well packaged. Strong box, holders at the ends of the drive, and a sealed bag. There was also a quality assurance sticker on the outside to verify the drive was not returned previously. Shipping was kinda slow but I'm fine with that. SMART data showed almost exactly 39 months of power on hours and roughly 400 power cycles. $80 so $8/TB for what appears to be a really nice condition off-lease drive.
Took a few days to run a long SMART test, pre-clear, and add it into my Unraid array. No problems reported at all and the drive runs almost 20C cooler than my super hot Seagate 6TBs at full load.
How do you run a long smart test? I thought it was just something that said whether or nto HDD failure was imminent?
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More modern hardware would certainly consume less power, but what you have is free to use today. Buy something more efficient and it will be quite some time before you see a payback, if at all. I typically have my drives spun down and rely on SSD cache for most of my data transfers. It doesn't pull much power during the day. Your plex storage would probably require a different config but you could certainly implement some power savings strategies.
I'm more motivated to upgrade my system more because it's old than for performance or energy efficiency. It's not like I'm running a legit commercial grade server.