Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive pricing and the near future

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:32 PM Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If anyone reading this does track the pricing of drives, are they on the
> rise, stable, dropping or what?  Is this a good time to expand while it
> is more cost effective?  I shop around on ebay, Amazon and others before
> buying.  I'm not opposed to buying used since I can sometimes find one
> that was pulled and sometimes has only a few hours of use.  I found one
> once that only had like 10 hours on it.  Still got it too.

Dropping I would say.  For a while the supply was interrupted, most
likely due to Chia.  Fortunately the price of Chia dropped and it
became the network had gotten so large that payback was going to be
very slow except for a few weeks in the beginning.  I suspect that
people with a lot of storage might be farming Chia with their spare
storage, but I doubt anybody is buying pallets of hard drives just to
farm it.

If you aren't in a hurry or picky about the model I suggest setting up
searches on slickdeals.  Then be sure to check online to see if the
drive is known to be SMR.  When I buy a drive I do a bit of
benchmarking just to make sure - I think just running more than one
pass on badblocks would probably catch it (granted the access is all
sequential, but the drive has no way of knowing that and so on each
pass it would have to do two passes to consolidate writes).

Usually the best prices are on USB3 10+TB hard drives.  The good 3.5"
drives tend to be more expensive since they're targeted at commercial
use.  You can generally shuck the drive out of a USB3 enclosure if you
want to, but if your PSU isn't compatible you have to do a bit of
workarounds because they use the latest SATA power standard and some
genius decided not to make that backwards-compatible with the SATA
power found all over the place.  Usually that is only used in
enterprise drives and the USB3 enclosures often use surplus enterprise
disks (so you're getting a really good value with them).  If you keep
it in the enclosure you don't have to worry about it.  I've found
about half my PSUs work fine them, and half require polyamide tape
games to work.

-- 
Rich