Rich Freeman wrote: > On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:32 PM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: >> 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. > Dropping I would say. For a while the supply was interrupted, most > 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. >
I may give it a bit and see what they do then. My /home is at 65% so I got time, especially while on this whimpy DSL. I recently discovered torrents and its advantages and now my DSL stays busy. I only pause it when I need the internet for something else. When fiber gets here, oh dear. You the one who introduced me to SMR. I bought one and started a thread about why my external drive had this bumpy feel long after my backups were done. You posted about SMR and how they work. For the backup drive, I don't mind much but if I had known before I bought it, I would have avoided it. I let the drive sit until the bumpy feel goes away after I do my backups, which at times takes a while. Now I try to avoid them and research before hitting the buy button. I've looked into buying external drives and removing them for internal use. It seems to be a little risky given the power problem. At one point I thought I found a adapter, maybe a China made thing, that plugs into the drive and then regular power supply cables plug into the adapter. I never bought one since I think it may be best to just buy drives made for going in my puter case and hooking directly to my cables. I've read where you can save quite a bit of money doing that tho. May give this a bit more time. See what the prices do. Thanks for the info. Dale :-) :-)
