I’m sketching the idea of building a NAS in my home, using a USB RAID enclosure (which may eventually turn into a proper NAS enclosure).
I haven’t got the enclosure yet but that’s not that big of a deal, right now I’m thinking whether to buy HDDs for the storage (currently have none) to setup RAID, but I cannot find good deals on HDDs.
I found on reddit that people were buying high capacity drives for as low as $15/TB, e.g. paying $100 for 10/12TB drives, but nowadays it’s just impossible to find drives at a bargain price, thanks to AI datacenters, I guess.
In Europe I’ve heard of datablocks.dev where you can buy white-label or recertified Seagate disks, sometimes you can find refurbished drives in eBay, but I can’t find these bargain deals everyone seemed to have up until last year?
For example, is 134 EUR for a 6TB refurbished Toshiba HDD a good price, considering the price hikes? What price per TB should I be looking for to consider the drives cheap? Where else can I search for these cheap drives?
Some other higher end selfhosters may not approve of them, but I’ll tell you that shucked WD externals are mostly what I run on my computers/servers.
Do they have some sort of speed degradation forced by the firmware? I read on Reddit that some of they may have a firmware that slows them down so they will never be as fast as an internal HDD. Did you notice something similar?
That’s a technical level that is beyond my realm of experience. I have not noticed any real world degradation of speed. However, My Book units are usually WD Green SMR consumer grade HDDs or high capacity drives that have lower sustained write performance than desktop CMR drives, so it may impact sustained/random small write workloads, but I have no data to support that either way.