glizzyguzzler

F in the chat for your savings, least you’ve got the peak of home NASes. Pretty fuckin cool and I hold out hope when the drop comes in a… 6 months to 3 years…? that I’ll be able to afford full SSD NAS life. The power savings, the speed, the no worries of shock or vibrations, the silence - jealous

It is a gamble, fuck the AI bozos for speculating us into economic uncertainty

For power on and off automatically, I just rely on Linux’s spin down timer. Which I guess is built in - not sure of anything more specific!

Backup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.

For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.

Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.

Edit: again, if I was going to save cash I would drop the RAID1 from the data drives and just get 1 data drive and 1 backup drive. RAID1 is never as good as an independent copy.

I got several from them and they’ve been fine for a year now - and theoretically have a 5 year warranty from them too. So worked out for me to save some cash! Buuuut if they do end up failing, it’s gonna be a hassle to get replacements for sure

Consumer is fine then, cheapest you can. Edit: I did see people mention SMR drives, get cheapest CMR drives. SMR is not worth the money saved for usual use cases.

You can def wait, but do the over-under with what you can pay. External drives, even if shucked, seem to be the lowest quality drives and die earliest. May be better to get real drives now, even with inflated costs.

Make sure you get a drive for backup. Extra layout up front but worth it. I’d recc 1 data drive + 1 backup drive over just 2 raid1 data drives any day.

Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise. Massive price gouging going on with all storage pre-sold based on IOUs to “AI” companies.

If you must…

Buy used enterprise drives with a ~5 year warranty. In US there is serverpartdeals and goharddrives. I am not sure of the Europe equivalents but I am sure they exist. The enterprise drives should be cheaper than new drives and will last longer; they’ve been used out of their early failure bathtub curve but they’re young enough to be given a 5 year warranty. Make sure to get ones with SATA connectors not SAS, you’ll need a PCIe card to talk to the SAS ones, and maybe something for power idk.

They should be cheaper - I am not sure if price uncertainty has upended that.

Enterprise drives are louder, I have them in a quiet case with sound dampening padding (fractal define) and I do not hear them 5 feet away.

I have heard bad things about consumer drives longevity. I used several 1 TB barracudas for years with no issues in a server setting, I used 3 TB barracudas in a server setting and one failed early. I used a 4 TB Toshiba that failed early and I used an 8 TB blue that is fine in a personal computing setting. I have bought enterprise drives and none have an issue yet.

It seems luck of the draw, so the thing to maximize is cheapest per GB.