Large hard disk: cheapest to buy?

Wcool

Hi,

My home server is in desperate need of more disk space. Typically I would buy a large disk on Amazon for around 180 euro and 2 years ago that would buy me a 6TB disk.
It seems that in 2 years the prices of large disks haven't really come down or am I looking in the wrong spots?

Any recommendations for (cheap) retailers for disks? Ideally > 6TB but if the price/capacity isn't great I will stick with 6T.

Cheers

glomar

seen 6tb drives toshiba branded for 159 on amazon 3.5 inch form factor .
there is an 8tb external wd for similiar money .
But until 16tb drives come online too the consumer you are going to have to wait out the prices

ED E

Prices are pretty stagnant.

K.O.Kiki

glomar wrote: »

seen 6tb drives toshiba branded for 159 on amazon 3.5 inch form factor .
there is an 8tb external wd for similiar money .
But until 16tb drives come online too the consumer you are going to have to wait out the prices

ED E wrote: »

Prices are pretty stagnant.

Prices are falling actually, I think OP must've gotten his 6Tb on sale.

https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1317598&age=9999
https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1311460&age=9999
https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1504516&age=9999

Wcool

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Prices are falling actually, I think OP must've gotten his 6Tb on sale.

https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1317598&age=9999
https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1311460&age=9999
https://geizhals.eu/?phist=1504516&age=9999

yeah I think it was indeed actually just over a year ago and it was in pounds.
I am not really impressed with the price drop.

Thanks for the price comparison site.
The price comparison lists 8TB for around 225 euro, 50 euro extra for 2TB,
10TB from 300 and 12TB from 400

Not great

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Think about using smaller drives and use a parity raid system like unraid or its free equivalent. 4gb drives are for nothings, and you can add in your own existing drives and new ones in the future.

Wcool

You are right about 4TB being nothing My smallest disk is 3T and the rest are all bigger. I can't really use 4TB anymore, it's just not enough.

My tactic was to buy a new disk every year (more diskspace for the same price every year, I do this since 2005), copy the data to the new disk and move the disk to a backup server. The backup server has 5 slots (HP microserver) and my always-on home server has 4 SATA + 4 SATA PCI-E bus, all slots occupied.

Because I have only 5 slots in the backup I am forced to buy big enough disks to hold all data. This is now becoming a problem as hard disks are not getting bigger capacities for the same price fast enough.

Guess I have to fork out for 2 big disks (one for the backup, one for the home server). My data is important enough.

btkm8unsl0w5r4

NO you didnt get my point.

Look into unraid, you can just add disks in an it looks like one big disk. Its safe storage too as one disk can fail and you can still get your data. Its much more cost effective. I have 6 or so 4gb drive in a 22gb volume.

K.O.Kiki

Wcool wrote: »

You are right about 4TB being nothing My smallest disk is 3T and the rest are all bigger. I can't really use 4TB anymore, it's just not enough.

My tactic was to buy a new disk every year (more diskspace for the same price every year, I do this since 2005), copy the data to the new disk and move the disk to a backup server. The backup server has 5 slots (HP microserver) and my always-on home server has 4 SATA + 4 SATA PCI-E bus, all slots occupied.

Because I have only 5 slots in the backup I am forced to buy big enough disks to hold all data. This is now becoming a problem as hard disks are not getting bigger capacities for the same price fast enough.

Guess I have to fork out for 2 big disks (one for the backup, one for the home server). My data is important enough.

You should be looking into an off-site/cloud backup solution TBH

Wcool

Maybe I didn't get you indeed. AFAIK Unraid is a dedicated OS for disk storage.
Basically NAS software.

I try to avoid NAS solutions as I find them too limiting. When you run a standard Linux distribution, you can also run torrents, media servers, TOR, VPN servers and clients, remote desktop stuff, game servers, and what not.

I do get that I could run RAID 5 + logical volume management and maybe I should, I somehow don't trust it and I had enough space on the old server to still make use of the old disks. Maybe it is time to revise that strategy and buy a disk cabinet that I can attach to the server.

But to make that idea successful, I really need a disk cabinet with at least 8 slots as 22TB is really nothing.

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Unraid and free Nas are custom linux distros for nas alright. Both will run linux dockers for whatever you want. Unraid is particularly good for virtualisation.

I dont trust mechanical drives more than I dont trust a nas. Cloud storage is too slow for most applications.

Serephucus

Wcool wrote: »

Maybe I didn't get you indeed. AFAIK Unraid is a dedicated OS for disk storage.
Basically NAS software.

I try to avoid NAS solutions as I find them too limiting. When you run a standard Linux distribution, you can also run torrents, media servers, TOR, VPN servers and clients, remote desktop stuff, game servers, and what not.

I do get that I could run RAID 5 + logical volume management and maybe I should, I somehow don't trust it and I had enough space on the old server to still make use of the old disks. Maybe it is time to revise that strategy and buy a disk cabinet that I can attach to the server.

But to make that idea successful, I really need a disk cabinet with at least 8 slots as 22TB is really nothing.

Might want to read up on unRAID. It's evolved a lot in the past couple of years.

It's a (relatively) standard Linux distro. Also has some really nice virtualisation stuff. VM management, along with hardware passthrough, and Docker integration too, which makes smaller stuff - torrent clients, downloading handling, Plex, etc. - really easy to setup.

This is on top of the storage stuff. Also lets you run SSD cache, and stand-alone drives.

Wcool

OK maybe things have evolved.
Note: my homeserver is a humble Celeron J1900 with 4Gs of DRAM. I hope docker doesn't have too much overhead.

New years resolution: Try out unRaid

btkm8unsl0w5r4

Wcool wrote: »

OK maybe things have evolved.
Note: my homeserver is a humble Celeron J1900 with 4Gs of DRAM. I hope docker doesn't have too much overhead.

New years resolution: Try out unRaid

My unraid server runs on a 8 core atom processor with 16gb, a celeron will be fine. The NAS part really doesn't require much processor or ram (free nas is a total ram hog but not unraid). I run a Plex server, a sync/torrent server, a windows and a ubuntu virtual machine at the same time no issues. Now the virtual machines are not snappy but they go about their jobs and the plex server can transcode multiple streams just fine. I just had a disk fail, it emulated all the data, moved it to another drive and rebuilt the parity without any input from me. I will remove the drive in time. I buy up 2gb and 4gb drives on adverts and plug them in when I need more space (unraid has a preclear disk function that takes a day to check every bit on a disk before it put it into function, you can have up to 24 physical drives, 2 cache drives (I use an inexpensive SSD) and up to 4 parity drives. Its a absolute wonder. Up to the drive failure I had the NAS online without a reboot for over 200 days, which for a tinker'er like me is awesome.

colm_c

I also run unraid, built it 11 months ago.

Couldn't be happier with the setup, I run plex, sonarr, radarr and a few other dockers.

I have 6 hd slots, all used by 4 and 6TB disks.

I also have an ssd cache drive sitting in a pci adaptor bracket.

When properly configured, my disks are only spun up 5-10 % of the time, cache drive takes care of the rest.