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.
Howdy all,
I still have quite a bit of drive storage but I've read that prices on
drives are on the rise. Thing is, I don't track them much. I'm looking
at buying a 8TB drive and I've researched to make sure I'm getting a
PMR/CMR drive. I'm avoiding a SMR since it doesn't perform as well in
my use case. I tend to stick with Seagate, WD and other major makers.
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.
One reason I'm wanting to do this now is price. However, in a year or
so, I'm getting fiber internet, dang fast at that. It's starts at 200Mb
but still over a 100 times faster than current connection. It goes all
the way up to 1Gb. God help us all. ROFL
Thoughts??
Dale
:-) :-)
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 theDropping I would say. For a while the supply was interrupted, most
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.
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.
If anyone reading this does track the pricing of drives, are they on
the rise, stable, dropping or what?
On Tue, 2021-10-05 at 18:32 -0500, Dale wrote:
If anyone reading this does track the pricing of drives, are they onI can't speak to trends, but I've used this site in the past to keep an
the rise, stable, dropping or what?
eye out for a deal when it comes up. It only indexes Amazon prices,
but its usually a good bellweather for how things look in general.
https://diskprices.com/
Other option, depending on exactly what your use case is would be to look into your choice of filesystem. SMR doesn't like random writes into one of its chunks unless it has enough idle time to go back and straighten it out later is all. There arenow format options for ext4 to align its metadata to the SMR sections and to make it avoid random writes as much as it can. Additionally BTRFS, ZFS, and NILFS2 are all structured such that they tend to write from one end of the disk to the other and
I think what to look for there would be if there's a way to align the BTRFS chunks to the SMR blocks.
But the manufacturers decided to continue manufacturing CBR disks for the surveillance industry, so I haven't had to worry about it just yet.
Am Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 06:32:24PM -0500 schrieb Dale:
Howdy all,
[…]
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?
Well I’m on ye Olde Continent and here I use a price search engine called geizhals (German for scrooge). But they have an English equivalent ;-) and
of course use European pricing schemes (meaning including taxes, which you
do different).
https://skinflint.co.uk/?m=1
The big difference here: it allows you to filter and sort by all sorts of criteria, such as being (non-)SMR or price/TB. And it shows you the prices
of lots of different shops, including Amazon. So while it may not give you
an idea of the US market, it gives you one of available drive models.
But currently the WD Purples and the Seagate Skyhawks should all be CMR.
Obviously I have no power to hold them to that, so do not take this as any kind of guarantee. But if they change it without warning they're likely to have a lot of unhappy customers.
Am Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 10:24:07PM +0200 schrieb Frank Steinmetzger:
Am Tue, Oct 05, 2021 at 06:32:24PM -0500 schrieb Dale:Ah, and another reason why I wanted to suggest this site: it also remembers the price development of an item. If you view an item’s details, you have its price history on the top right of the screen.
Howdy all,Well I’m on ye Olde Continent and here I use a price search engine called >> geizhals (German for scrooge). But they have an English equivalent ;-) and >> of course use European pricing schemes (meaning including taxes, which you >> do different).
[…]
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?
https://skinflint.co.uk/?m=1
The big difference here: it allows you to filter and sort by all sorts of
criteria, such as being (non-)SMR or price/TB. And it shows you the prices >> of lots of different shops, including Amazon. So while it may not give you >> an idea of the US market, it gives you one of available drive models.
Well I’m on ye Olde Continent and here I use a price search engine called geizhals (German for scrooge). But they have an English equivalent ;-) and
of course use European pricing schemes (meaning including taxes, which you
do different).
https://skinflint.co.uk/?m=1
Sysop: | Keyop |
---|---|
Location: | Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK |
Users: | 296 |
Nodes: | 16 (2 / 14) |
Uptime: | 50:36:59 |
Calls: | 6,649 |
Calls today: | 1 |
Files: | 12,200 |
Messages: | 5,330,212 |