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Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:32 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote: |
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>> If anyone reading this does track the pricing of drives, are they on the |
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>> rise, stable, dropping or what? Is this a good time to expand while it |
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>> is more cost effective? I shop around on ebay, Amazon and others before |
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>> buying. I'm not opposed to buying used since I can sometimes find one |
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>> that was pulled and sometimes has only a few hours of use. I found one |
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>> once that only had like 10 hours on it. Still got it too. |
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> Dropping I would say. For a while the supply was interrupted, most |
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> likely due to Chia. Fortunately the price of Chia dropped and it |
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> became the network had gotten so large that payback was going to be |
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> very slow except for a few weeks in the beginning. I suspect that |
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> people with a lot of storage might be farming Chia with their spare |
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> storage, but I doubt anybody is buying pallets of hard drives just to |
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> farm it. |
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> |
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> If you aren't in a hurry or picky about the model I suggest setting up |
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> searches on slickdeals. Then be sure to check online to see if the |
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> drive is known to be SMR. When I buy a drive I do a bit of |
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> benchmarking just to make sure - I think just running more than one |
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> pass on badblocks would probably catch it (granted the access is all |
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> sequential, but the drive has no way of knowing that and so on each |
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> pass it would have to do two passes to consolidate writes). |
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> |
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> Usually the best prices are on USB3 10+TB hard drives. The good 3.5" |
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> drives tend to be more expensive since they're targeted at commercial |
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> use. You can generally shuck the drive out of a USB3 enclosure if you |
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> want to, but if your PSU isn't compatible you have to do a bit of |
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> workarounds because they use the latest SATA power standard and some |
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> genius decided not to make that backwards-compatible with the SATA |
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> power found all over the place. Usually that is only used in |
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> enterprise drives and the USB3 enclosures often use surplus enterprise |
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> disks (so you're getting a really good value with them). If you keep |
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> it in the enclosure you don't have to worry about it. I've found |
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> about half my PSUs work fine them, and half require polyamide tape |
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> games to work. |
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> |
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|
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I may give it a bit and see what they do then. My /home is at 65% so I |
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got time, especially while on this whimpy DSL. I recently discovered |
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torrents and its advantages and now my DSL stays busy. I only pause it |
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when I need the internet for something else. When fiber gets here, oh |
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dear. |
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|
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You the one who introduced me to SMR. I bought one and started a thread |
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about why my external drive had this bumpy feel long after my backups |
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were done. You posted about SMR and how they work. For the backup |
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drive, I don't mind much but if I had known before I bought it, I would |
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have avoided it. I let the drive sit until the bumpy feel goes away |
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after I do my backups, which at times takes a while. Now I try to avoid |
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them and research before hitting the buy button. |
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|
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I've looked into buying external drives and removing them for internal |
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use. It seems to be a little risky given the power problem. At one |
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point I thought I found a adapter, maybe a China made thing, that plugs |
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into the drive and then regular power supply cables plug into the |
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adapter. I never bought one since I think it may be best to just buy |
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drives made for going in my puter case and hooking directly to my |
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cables. I've read where you can save quite a bit of money doing that tho. |
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|
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May give this a bit more time. See what the prices do. |
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|
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Thanks for the info. |
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|
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Dale |
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|
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:-) :-) |