Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive pricing and the near future

SMR drive prices are hopefully dropping.  A couple of months ago I bought a couple of used Hitachi 4 GB drives, for my raid setup.  Being raid I got recertified drives on ebay.  They were about $65, up from about $50 for the same drives a couple of years ago.  Larger new drives are hopefully coming down (I'd still like to have proper backup when I can afford it)

RE: the SATA power connection change, it's stupid but easy to fix.  Just cut the orange wire going to the drive power connector.  I don't think anyone uses 3.3V on hard drives (the orange wire), and letting it float works with the rather damaged change to the spec.  Of course, only do this on the drive connectors.  Doesn't cause a problem on older drives.  Alternately, you can use a "Molex" to sata power connector, since the 4 pin Molex connectors don't have a 3.3V line the adapters always leave it unconnected.  Might be preferable if your' system has some of the older connectors and you are nervous about cutting wires though in the case of the drives it's absolutely OK.  As these drive power connector are usually daisy chained it's best to cut the orange wire on all the SATA power connectors.


--"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." Tommy Douglas




Oct 5, 2021, 17:32 by rdalek1967@×××××.com:

> Howdy all,
>
> I still have quite a bit of drive storage but I've read that prices on
> drives are on the rise.  Thing is, I don't track them much.  I'm looking
> at buying a 8TB drive and I've researched to make sure I'm getting a
> PMR/CMR drive.  I'm avoiding a SMR since it doesn't perform as well in
> my use case.  I tend to stick with Seagate, WD and other major makers.
>
> 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. 
>
> One reason I'm wanting to do this now is price.  However, in a year or
> so, I'm getting fiber internet, dang fast at that.  It's starts at 200Mb
> but still over a 100 times faster than current connection.  It goes all
> the way up to 1Gb.  God help us all.  ROFL
>
> Thoughts??
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-) 
>