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

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Rich Freeman wrote:
> 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.
>

I may give it a bit and see what they do then.  My /home is at 65% so I
got time, especially while on this whimpy DSL.  I recently discovered
torrents and its advantages and now my DSL stays busy.  I only pause it
when I need the internet for something else.  When fiber gets here, oh
dear. 

You the one who introduced me to SMR.  I bought one and started a thread
about why my external drive had this bumpy feel long after my backups
were done.  You posted about SMR and how they work.  For the backup
drive, I don't mind much but if I had known before I bought it, I would
have avoided it.  I let the drive sit until the bumpy feel goes away
after I do my backups, which at times takes a while.  Now I try to avoid
them and research before hitting the buy button. 

I've looked into buying external drives and removing them for internal
use.  It seems to be a little risky given the power problem.  At one
point I thought I found a adapter, maybe a China made thing, that plugs
into the drive and then regular power supply cables plug into the
adapter.  I never bought one since I think it may be best to just buy
drives made for going in my puter case and hooking directly to my
cables.  I've read where you can save quite a bit of money doing that tho. 

May give this a bit more time.  See what the prices do.

Thanks for the info.

Dale

:-)  :-)