3TB HGST Refirbs (eBay Newegg) 55 cad


mikefallen

Recommended Posts

  • 5 months later...

The sweet spot right now is the 8tb drives.  Very affordable, and stable.  I really wouldn't recommend buying smaller drives today.  The WD and the Seagates both are working well.  Note that the Seagates 8tb Archives are SMR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording) and the WD are PMR (non shingled).  Exhaustive research here on the forum proved that SMR drives work good with unRaid.  Many are using them.  However if this worries you, grab the WD drives.  The best price is found in external USB drives that need to be shucked from their plastic cases to install bare metal into unRaid servers.  Note USB drives can be used with unRaid, as non-array storage, but the USB interface is not supported for array drives.  Shucking is required and for that you save $50 - $100 per drive.

 

These newer 8tb drives are about twice as fast as the 3tb Hitachi's.  There are faster drives if you don't mind jumping to the 10tb, 12tb and 14tb size, but the increased speed is less than 20%.  You will however be paying at least double the price for a small increase in capacity and speed for the newest and largest drives.

Link to comment

I won't buy anything smaller than 6TB these days, simply not worth it for me. I also won't buy refurbed drives, while you can get lucky and get a deal, they usually come with limited warranties and I'd rather spend the extra few $$ to get the two or three year warranty. When the 8TB Seagate externals are on sale for $179 CAD then they are a deal and I'll buy a bunch, but I haven't see that price in awhile now so I am waiting. I have 17 of the 8TB Seagate's deployed between three of my unRAID servers, no issues in over three years.

Link to comment
9 hours ago, tr0910 said:

The sweet spot right now is the 8tb drives.  Very affordable, and stable.  I really wouldn't recommend buying smaller drives today.  The WD and the Seagates both are working well.  Note that the Seagates 8tb Archives are SMR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingled_magnetic_recording) and the WD are PMR (non shingled).  Exhaustive research here on the forum proved that SMR drives work good with unRaid.  Many are using them.  However if this worries you, grab the WD drives.  The best price is found in external USB drives that need to be shucked from their plastic cases to install bare metal into unRaid servers.  Note USB drives can be used with unRaid, as non-array storage, but the USB interface is not supported for array drives.  Shucking is required and for that you save $50 - $100 per drive.

 

These newer 8tb drives are about twice as fast as the 3tb Hitachi's.  There are faster drives if you don't mind jumping to the 10tb, 12tb and 14tb size, but the increased speed is less than 20%.  You will however be paying at least double the price for a small increase in capacity and speed for the newest and largest drives.

I thought external drives were like buying a prebuild pc at Wallmart, a bad deal compared to buying components. 50-100$ per drive is quite nice!

Also if the higher capacity drives are actually faster then it's a no brainer, since you get more capacity per dollar with larger drives.

Personally I just want to have somewhere to dumb raw video I use for youtube, so I don't really need that much storage yet. However in my use case large drives are perfect considering I just need to expand every now and then

Link to comment
9 hours ago, ashman70 said:

I won't buy anything smaller than 6TB these days, simply not worth it for me. I also won't buy refurbed drives, while you can get lucky and get a deal, they usually come with limited warranties and I'd rather spend the extra few $$ to get the two or three year warranty. When the 8TB Seagate externals are on sale for $179 CAD then they are a deal and I'll buy a bunch, but I haven't see that price in awhile now so I am waiting. I have 17 of the 8TB Seagate's deployed between three of my unRAID servers, no issues in over three years.

That's 130'ish USD, there is no way that's a 8 TB high reliability drive, right? :D

Personally I never had any drive fail on me, the most dramatic thing I have seen was my diablo 2 CD shatter inside my optical drive.

Link to comment
  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.