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On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:32 PM Dale <rdalek1967@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> |
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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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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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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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Rich |
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