Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive pricing and the near future
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2021 00:33:02
Message-Id: c24025d2-c88e-6e1c-2f41-f42c5c894921@gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive pricing and the near future by Rich Freeman
1 Rich Freeman wrote:
2 > On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:32 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote:
3 >> If anyone reading this does track the pricing of drives, are they on the
4 >> rise, stable, dropping or what? Is this a good time to expand while it
5 >> is more cost effective? I shop around on ebay, Amazon and others before
6 >> buying. I'm not opposed to buying used since I can sometimes find one
7 >> that was pulled and sometimes has only a few hours of use. I found one
8 >> once that only had like 10 hours on it. Still got it too.
9 > Dropping I would say. For a while the supply was interrupted, most
10 > likely due to Chia. Fortunately the price of Chia dropped and it
11 > became the network had gotten so large that payback was going to be
12 > very slow except for a few weeks in the beginning. I suspect that
13 > people with a lot of storage might be farming Chia with their spare
14 > storage, but I doubt anybody is buying pallets of hard drives just to
15 > farm it.
16 >
17 > If you aren't in a hurry or picky about the model I suggest setting up
18 > searches on slickdeals. Then be sure to check online to see if the
19 > drive is known to be SMR. When I buy a drive I do a bit of
20 > benchmarking just to make sure - I think just running more than one
21 > pass on badblocks would probably catch it (granted the access is all
22 > sequential, but the drive has no way of knowing that and so on each
23 > pass it would have to do two passes to consolidate writes).
24 >
25 > Usually the best prices are on USB3 10+TB hard drives. The good 3.5"
26 > drives tend to be more expensive since they're targeted at commercial
27 > use. You can generally shuck the drive out of a USB3 enclosure if you
28 > want to, but if your PSU isn't compatible you have to do a bit of
29 > workarounds because they use the latest SATA power standard and some
30 > genius decided not to make that backwards-compatible with the SATA
31 > power found all over the place. Usually that is only used in
32 > enterprise drives and the USB3 enclosures often use surplus enterprise
33 > disks (so you're getting a really good value with them). If you keep
34 > it in the enclosure you don't have to worry about it. I've found
35 > about half my PSUs work fine them, and half require polyamide tape
36 > games to work.
37 >
38
39 I may give it a bit and see what they do then.  My /home is at 65% so I
40 got time, especially while on this whimpy DSL.  I recently discovered
41 torrents and its advantages and now my DSL stays busy.  I only pause it
42 when I need the internet for something else.  When fiber gets here, oh
43 dear. 
44
45 You the one who introduced me to SMR.  I bought one and started a thread
46 about why my external drive had this bumpy feel long after my backups
47 were done.  You posted about SMR and how they work.  For the backup
48 drive, I don't mind much but if I had known before I bought it, I would
49 have avoided it.  I let the drive sit until the bumpy feel goes away
50 after I do my backups, which at times takes a while.  Now I try to avoid
51 them and research before hitting the buy button. 
52
53 I've looked into buying external drives and removing them for internal
54 use.  It seems to be a little risky given the power problem.  At one
55 point I thought I found a adapter, maybe a China made thing, that plugs
56 into the drive and then regular power supply cables plug into the
57 adapter.  I never bought one since I think it may be best to just buy
58 drives made for going in my puter case and hooking directly to my
59 cables.  I've read where you can save quite a bit of money doing that tho. 
60
61 May give this a bit more time.  See what the prices do.
62
63 Thanks for the info.
64
65 Dale
66
67 :-)  :-)