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. -- Rich
