On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 2:11 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I did find a WD Red 8TB drive. It costs a good bit more. It's a good > deal but still costs more. I'm going to keep looking. Eventually I'll > either spend the money on the drive or find a really good deal. My home > directory is at 69% so I got some time left. Of course, my collection > is still growing. o_O
In theory the 8TB reds are SMR-free. You should take a look at /r/datahoarder and its wiki for tips on cheap drives. I've been shucking 10-12TB external drives lately. You can get a 12TB drive for $180 which is $15/TB. It is REALLY hard to top those sorts of prices in bare 3.5" drives of any kind. The main problem with shucking is that it isn't the intended use of the drive. First you have to actually shuck them. Then you get to deal with the 3.3V pin issue depending on your power supply. Then if you ever want warranty replacement you need to restore the drive to original condition. And finally you have no guarantee as to what is in the box, which means you have to follow various online sources like that sub to see what others are seeing in these drives. Indications are that a lot of these drives are surplus enterprise drives of very high quality - often having SMART data for Helium-filled drives. But for all we know next week they could start sticking SMR on them and not tell anybody. Depending on your use case you could probably even consider just leaving these drives in their enclosures. USB3 performs really well in general, though obviously if you try to stack 8 drives on a single USB3 bus you're probably not going to get the same performance as an 8x PCIe LSI HBA with 8 SATA ports. If you're just using them for bulk storage of multimedia that might not be a big deal, but if you're trying to run a cluster of VMs off of them it could be a problem. I think the drive manufacturers are basically trying to segment the market. They're selling essentially the same drive for either $180, $220, or $320+ depending on whether you're willing to wait for a sale, buy the external drive at full price, or you want the 3.5" drive labeled for actual RAID use. They know that small businesses without volume deals will end up paying $320, and then enthusiasts will shuck drives, and with any luck not bother asking for RMAs if they fail a year later. Large companies pay substantially lower prices for 3.5" drives using volume discounts so they get the best of all worlds. Oh, the other thing is that the larger external drives often have semi-exclusive deals with stores like Best Buy. They're becoming easier to find, but usually you're going to end up with the best deals waiting for a sale and getting them at a place like Best Buy, and not your usual PC part dealer. It is crazy, but that is how it works, and it is a real bummer to go into Microcenter and see nothing but overpriced low-capacity 3.5" drives (many of which ended up turning out to be secretly SMR - not Microcenter's fault of course). Ultimately this just reflects that drive manufacturers have consolidated down into what amounts to a cartel with a lot of leverage over anybody who isn't buying drives by the pallet. -- Rich
