One hard drive? :p
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Sweet spot imo is used 16-18tb or 8-12tb new.
Im considering buying some used exos drives with about two years spun up.
How much space do you need? Number of disks is irrelevant until you know your storage needs. If it can fit under 20TB then just buy two of the same size disks and create a backup on a regular basis.
Fewer disks means less complexity, less power, fewer points of failure, and typically less cost than buying multiple smaller disks to reach the same capacity.
If you want your data to be safe, then have at least one backup, preferably two.
I know you can get 20TB in a single HDD for $280
Amazon is selling the Seagate Exos 20tb for less than 300 usd
I dunno, for the budget you're looking at I would probably still go with fleabay's big drive resellers. goharddrive offers a decently long warranty period on their enterprise stuff and has 8TB HGST drives in your budget.
I'm not storing anything important, ... I'm also unwilling to delete anything I downloaded with my overpriced internet.
These 2 statements don't really go together. Either the stuff you have is worth keeping, or it's not. If you're unwilling to delete, and unwilling to re-download, then why would you risk losing it to a bad drive that you got for cheap?
and unwilling to re-download
Re-downloading would also hurt my wallet. I want to keep what I have and have the ability to download more, but not for more than $300 or $400. Is that possible in your opinion? I know I'll never get a new drive that has any sort of density I'm looking for at that price. So I'm willing to use refurb drives and deal with the possibility of failure as long as those risks are within reason. I guess that means a place with some kind of buyer protection or return policy that's better than begging and pleading with ebay as the arbiter.
I think that you will get better bang for your buck with much larger drives. I think the cheapest per TB is currently somewhere between 16TB and 20TB for new drives. In addition you save power and especially drive bays compared to 6TB drives. Drive bays, ports and PSU are very expensive as well!
You asks if you have to increase budget, but you didn't mention how much storage space you are looking for. New drives are at 18TB $199 price point, historical low. Unless you want to buy small drives but I don't think you'll get the most out of your money.
Any external drives at a good price point?
It is extremely unlikely for the market to return to the sweet spot (price/TB) being at $50-$60 drives as it was before the "hard drive crisis that started at the end of 2011".
Beside being not that good at TB/$ the small drives will cost more over time in power, and taking more bays and crippling your upgrade possibilities, the chances to sell them for something when you need to upgrade and so on. Oh, plus nowadays you'll need to pay a premium to get out of the SMR doghouse, while with the large drives it just comes with the size.
In short just take one very large drive and wait for more money or increase (not much) the budget and get a similar one too. Or two of the medium-large-size. I'm sure you want 5 for redundancy, but this way you can do real backups (or even if you do RAID1 it'll be WAY safer than RAID5). No matter if you're losing "only" 20% with RAID5 versus 50% with RAID1 (or backups, much more recommended) it's probably more likely you can do 2x16TB in $300 than 5x4TBs (let's say either for 16TB usable). And better all around.
ahem RAID is not backup
Thanks for your response and that's kind of what I was fearing.
With that said...yeah I do have a RAID 5 array and that's really the main reason why I want 5x$60 drives, just drop in replacement and copy back the data. I understand RAID 1 would be safer, but it won't be as fast and sacrifice too much drive in the name of redundancy. I enjoy the balance of read speed, redundancy, and array size of RAID 5 and it's been working well for my purposes.
Just do raidz1 across 3 drives. 10tb drives are probably what you want in that case. That said I'm just upgrading to a single 20tb instead of another array, you might consider doing the same and expanding later