Buying large HDDs in 2023?

Blythe93 · Feb 1, 2023

I'm looking into getting myself an HTPC with 2x 12-18TB 3.5 HDDs set in RAID 1, but after looking into prices they... aren't the best right now due to Chia mining and all that stuff. For example, in 2021 at my place you could get 12TB Seagate Ironwolf for around $200, but now it's like $330. Should I wait some more (and hope for the price drops?) before I buy myself HDDs or maybe try my luck with used ones? I've found some 18TB Seagate Exos for $225, which might be good pick.

Hayato213 · Feb 1, 2023

It depends on how much data is written on the used 18TB, Seagate Ironwolf can handle about 180TB reads and writes per year, Seagate Ironwolf Pro can handle about 300TB reads and writes per year, and 550TB reads and writes per year for EXOS.

r1vver · Feb 1, 2023

Hayato213 said:
Seagate Ironwolf Pro can handle about 300TB reads and writes per year, and 550TB reads and writes per year.

That means 850 total?
Or is there something missing here?

Hayato213 · Feb 1, 2023

r1vver said:
That means 850 total?
Or is there something missing here?

550 TBW for EXOS

Blythe93 · Feb 1, 2023

Hayato213 said:
It depends on how much data is written on the used 18TB, Seagate Ironwolf can handle about 180TB reads and writes per year, Seagate Ironwolf Pro can handle about 300TB reads and writes per year, and 550TB reads and writes per year for EXOS.

I see, thanks for the info. I already asked for some more details about HDDs' health, I'll post them here once I get them. Only thing I've found on the product listing is that they both have 100% health and that's it, no image from apps like HDD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo, unfortunately.

Hayato213 · Feb 1, 2023

Blythe93 said:
I see, thanks for the info. I already asked for some more details about HDDs' health, I'll post them here once I get them. Only thing I've found on the product listing is that they both have 100% health and that's it, no image from apps like HDD Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo, unfortunately.

Yea you really need that info to determine if you want to buy it or not, it might have like couple thousand power on hours and few power cycle, since people use these drive for like NAS purpose.

Marc_LFD · Feb 1, 2023

I have a couple of 8TB HDDs and I'm very happy with it. Would I prefer if they were thin and smaller? Yeah, but as it is is not a deal-breaker for me.

Blythe93 · Feb 1, 2023

Just got the blurriest image I've seen in a while but I was able to get the following:
Power On Count: 67
Power On Hours: 12358
No reallocated sectors. Health Status: Good in CrystalDiskInfo.

Hayato213 · Feb 1, 2023

Blythe93 said:
Just got the blurriest image I've seen in a while but I was able to get the following:
Power On Count: 67
Power On Hours: 12358
No reallocated sectors. Health Status: Good in CrystalDiskInfo.

I wouldn't buy it due to that many power on hours. What you planning to do with the HTPC, like movies?

Blythe93 · Feb 1, 2023

Indeed. Plus, I'd move to it the stuff I've downloaded over the years (I do have around 15 500GB I pulled out of random laptops, PCs and alike which were either working fine already or were somewhat dead but magically resurrected). Other than that, main purpose would be downloading and watching movies and TV shows.

Hayato213 · Feb 1, 2023

Blythe93 said:
Indeed. Plus, I'd move to it the stuff I've downloaded over the years (I do have around 15 500GB I pulled out of random laptops, PCs and alike which were either working fine already or were somewhat dead but magically resurrected). Other than that, main purpose would be downloading and watching movies and TV shows.

My recommendation is getting a NAS that has hardware transcoding, and multiple drive bay for more redundancy, raid 1 is okay but it is only two drives only.

DinohScene · Feb 1, 2023

I would never buy used harddrives if I want to store data.
Used HDDs for work drives, sure but for storage, no.

DinohScene · Feb 1, 2023

Hayato213 said:
I wouldn't buy it due to that many power on hours. What you planning to do with the HTPC, like movies?

I have a drive with 85k power on hours on it, thing never had ANY issues until the day the cats knocked my laptop off off the table.
HDD took too big of a shock :c
The drive still works but SMART is triggered and I simply don't trust it anymore after such an event.

I'd rather be safe then sorry when it comes to data really.

(yes it has been replaced by an SSD)

tech3475 · Feb 1, 2023

Hayato213 said:
My recommendation is getting a NAS that has hardware transcoding, and multiple drive bay for more redundancy, raid 1 is okay but it is only two drives only.

I personally prefer computers running a NAS OS over over dedicated/embedded NAS, it may give more flexibility long term.

I bought a Seagate NAS once to shucker the HDDs, but whilst the server I put the HDDs in is still in use, the NAS itself is borderline useless because it’s so old (e.g. old unsupported SMB version).

I’m currently running unRAID and whilst it’s not perfect, it’s approach to parity based proection has been useful in terms of both data protection and scaling (note: I’m using ECC RAM, run regular checks and have a backup of anything important).

Marc_LFD · Feb 1, 2023

DinohScene said:
I would never buy used harddrives if I want to store data.
Used HDDs for work drives, sure but for storage, no.

I agree. I sold a 6TB HDD to someone on eBay and that was in excellent condition, but it can be risky to use a used HDD from somebody else.

I've seen stuff listed on eBay that looks absolutely disgusting (dirty as hell) and that alone is enough for me to never buy anything from them.

eternal · Feb 3, 2023

Hayato213 said:
My recommendation is getting a NAS that has hardware transcoding, and multiple drive bay for more redundancy, raid 1 is okay but it is only two drives only.

I agree with the NAS idea. Any love for UnRaid (for OP or other folks)?
I bought the lifetime license after a 30 day trial, and used it to set up a 3 disk hdd setup: one parity disk, and 2 drives with the real data for whatever, including a ryzen cpu that also had integrated graphics: ryzen 7 5700g, with a nvidia geforce 2060.

The catch is the parity disk has to be the largest disk out of all of the drives so you could technically buy a 16tb parity disk and have 2 or even 3 or more different sized hdds as long as they stay under the main parity drive size wise.

So if you did decide to do a NAs type of deal, I would suggest using sites like slickdeals.net to watch the prices since you can setup alerts there, and/or just buy whatever size drives you want and use unraid.

edit: forgot to mention I know this probably all sounds expensive but it would be a good investment for long term storage. Im using a plex docker on my unraid server and it works great. Before I was just storing everything on random drives like a savage.

Hayato213 · Feb 3, 2023

eternal said:
I agree with the NAS idea. Any love for UnRaid?
I bought the lifetime license after a 30 day trial, and used it to set up a 3 disk hdd setup: one parity disk, and 2 drives with the real data for whatever, including a ryzen cpu that also had integrated graphics: ryzen 7 5700g, with a nvidia geforce 2060.

The catch is the parity disk has to be the largest disk out of all of the drives so you could technically buy a 16tb parity disk and have 2 or even 3 or more different sized hdds as long as they stay under the main parity drive size wise.

So if you did decide to do a NAs type of deal, I would suggest using sites like slickdeals.net to watch the prices since you can setup alerts there, and/or just buy whatever size drives you want and use unraid.

For me I like to have redundancy, I have mine setup as SHR2 or raid 6 equivalent , I also backup my data to an external 18TB drive since my raid setup get me about 18TB of space.

Blythe93 · Feb 3, 2023

eternal said:
Before I was just storing everything on random drives like a savage.

That's me right now. ^^ One of the main reasons I decided to build myself a NAS is because recently one of my oldest drives died on me so suddenly, all sectors went bad. I believe it happened due to faulty USB cable that I used to connect to PC and after several reconnects or something, its main partition got corrupted. I tried to salvage the data from it but it was not possible. I attempted to format it the other day but to no avail. I cannot create a volume to make a partition on it, HDD reports sometimes having 0 bytes sometimes 1.82TB storage. "It's dead, Jim." never felt more appropriate so far.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

eternal said:
forgot to mention I know this probably all sounds expensive but it would be a good investment for long term storage

Indeed. Too bad that I postponed it for so long that one of my drives went bad in the meantime. Thankfully, all the data that was on it can be redownloaded (somewhat recent movies, TV shows, etc.) so it's not all that bad.

Hayato213 said:
I also backup my data to an external 18TB drive since my raid setup get me about 18TB of space.

That's a good idea as well. I'll keep it in mind.

I'll be looking into acquiring parts these days (well, mainly checking prices), won't rush it but think it over. If you have any more suggestions on what I should look for, I'd be grateful for your suggestions and opinions. I'll post my findings after a few days.

godreborn · Feb 3, 2023

Blythe93 said:
That's me right now. ^^ One of the main reasons I decided to build myself a NAS is because recently one of my oldest drives died on me so suddenly, all sectors went bad. I believe it happened due to faulty USB cable that I used to connect to PC and after several reconnects or something, its main partition got corrupted. I tried to salvage the data from it but it was not possible. I attempted to format it the other day but to no avail. I cannot create a volume to make a partition on it, HDD reports sometimes having 0 bytes sometimes 1.82TB storage. "It's dead, Jim." never felt more appropriate so far.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

Indeed. Too bad that I postponed it for so long that one of my drives went bad in the meantime. Thankfully, all the data that was on it can be redownloaded (somewhat recent movies, TV shows, etc.) so it's not all that bad.

That's a good idea as well. I'll keep it in mind.

I'll be looking into acquiring parts these days (well, mainly checking prices), won't rush it but think it over. If you have any more suggestions on what I should look for, I'd be grateful for your suggestions and opinions. I'll post my findings after a few days.

Can't afford a Nas setup unfortunately, been using 8 10tb hdds with half being for redundancy, for many years. I only get $609/month.

eternal · Feb 4, 2023

tech3475 said:
I personally prefer computers running a NAS OS over over dedicated/embedded NAS, it may give more flexibility long term.

I bought a Seagate NAS once to shucker the HDDs, but whilst the server I put the HDDs in is still in use, the NAS itself is borderline useless because it’s so old (e.g. old unsupported SMB version).

I’m currently running unRAID and whilst it’s not perfect, it’s approach to parity based proection has been useful in terms of both data protection and scaling (note: I’m using ECC RAM, run regular checks and have a backup of anything important).

Sorry, didn't see you mentioned unraid already, but you are right on flexibility

Offtopic: I use the cpu for plex transcoding on mine, and use the 2060 gpu in a vm for vr stuff. Eventually I'd liek to try setting up a wireguard thing for when Im away to access the files. Or I could just stick to parsec and remember to turn the vm on before I leave for a long trip

Edit: quoted the wrong person lol

Buying large HDDs in 2023?

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