Anyone with true HDDs still around here?

[lexluthermiester]

Well lets not take it out of context. To be clear. if my board fails on a server, im not replacing the disks. If I upgrade my personal system I'll re-use the SSDs.

Im just not going out and buying 200TB worth of used drives to put in servers I have to buy a plane ticket to reach physically, is what I mean, specifically.

Oh yeah, totally understand your situation. No worries.

 

[AusWolf]

Ah ok. The following might suit your need then(switched over to the Amazon.uk site);

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aluminum-Bay-RAID-Enclosure-Tool-Free-Black/dp/B0DCZB849Y

That enclosure plus two 12TB or 14TB drives would be a solid storage setup for RAID1.

There's also this one. Bit more expensive, but also Orico quality.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ORICO-External-Enclosure-Aluminum-Storage-9528RU3/dp/B09DYSLWHR

Yep, the first one is already in my basket, waiting for a discount notification (or my next pay check).

The Orico really looks nice with the aluminium case and everything, but it doesn't have a RAID 0/1 switch, and seems to support only 16 TB disks, while the other one does 20. If I make up my mind to spend this much money, at least I should make the most of it, I guess.

 

[natr0n]

I have 2 enterprise raid cards that support 8 and 16sata.The most drives I ever raid 0'd were 8 @ 1tb

That would be fun to try 16. I need some more sata splitters

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

320 =Common size in late '00s. Same with 250.

500 in the 2010s.

(For HDDs)

500 GB seems to be standard in the 2020s. It doesn't even look like you can get less than 500 GB for Western Digital HDDs now.

 

[AusWolf]

320 =Common size in late '00s. Same with 250.

500 in the 2010s.

(For HDDs)

500 GB seems to be standard in the 2020s. It doesn't even look like you can get less than 500 GB for Western Digital HDDs now.

500 GB is more like SSD size. HDD is for long-term storage, for which, 2-4 TB is the bare minimum, imo (unless you've got nothing to store, no family photos, etc.).

Edit: In my opinion, what determines the sweet spot in storage size is the difference in price. For example, when a 2 TB HDD is £56, and a 4 TB one is £87 (at Scan UK), of course I'll choose the 4 TB one.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Heads up: Lots of HDD stock issues at Western Digital! Also major server trouble as well.

Glad that I got the HDD that I got in early-September!

Edit: As of 7 PM EST, saw that the stock issue was actually a server problem.

 

[lexluthermiester]

500 GB seems to be standard in the 2020s. It doesn't even look like you can get less than 500 GB for Western Digital HDDs now.

Not new. New old stock sure, there's some of that floating around, but for HDD's the smallest consumer drive you can get is 1TB.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Looks like a lot of Western Digital's web services are back to normal.

Not new. New old stock sure, there's some of that floating around, but for HDD's the smallest consumer drive you can get is 1TB.

I thought that, too, but still see 500 GB Black HDDs at their store.

Do they sell NOS? I know Runnings does.

The Golds are at minimum, 1 TB.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I thought that, too, but still see 500 GB Black HDDs at their store.

Really, I looked earlier, didn't see it.

Correction, looks like they do, both in Blue and Black;

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/hdd/internal-hdd?filterByVvc-capacity=%3C+960+GB

Didn't come up earlier. I wonder why?

 

[eidairaman1]

I will Run HDs as my 2ndary drives probably until I die

 

[Princess Garnet]

320 =Common size in late '00s. Same with 250.

500 in the 2010s.

(For HDDs)

500 GB seems to be standard in the 2020s. It doesn't even look like you can get less than 500 GB for Western Digital HDDs now.

This reminds me of time I bought my first new storage drives! They were a pair of 320 GB Western Digital drives, back when they were still called "Caviar SE16". I want to say that was around late 2006 to late 2007. I was always using whatever 10 GB, 20 GB, or 40 GB HDD that came with the OEM PCs I had from the early to mid 2000s, so these 320 GB drives, and a pair of them at that, were absolutely massive to me (but far from the largest on the market). I to notice the "sweet spot" on price/capacity traditionally seemed to be whatever was around $100 (or a bit over), so I tended to buy there from that point forward.

A year or two later, 640 GB drives were now around there so I got a pair of those as well. They were still "Caviar SE16" drives. Not long later, I got another pair of 640 GB drives (and gave the original 320 GB drives to family PCs), but now they were called "Blue". I'm having trouble finding it, but if anyone remembers the exact timeframe that Western Digital introduced the color nomenclature and discontinued the Caviar naming, it would have been then, but I know it was the late 2000s.

I used those four 640 GB as combined storage until around late 2020 to early 2021. I moved to my first SSD, a 256 GB SATA, in late 2012, I added a larger 5 TB HDD in 2017, and the original SSD was replaced in 2020-ish with a 1TB SATA (and then it got replaced by a pair of 2 TB NVMe a while back when Western Digital ran that "buy two and get them $120 each" deal). I finally consolidated the increasingly-out-of-place four 640 GB drives with a pair of 4 TB (and then those quickly got replaced with 8 TB a year or two back). One is storage, with the other being (now external) backup.

Uh, there's my storage history to supplement my original post in this thread, haha.

My next hope is to get rid of the 5 TB HDD (this would get me down to just the one 8 TB internal, and I can live with a single storage HDD for the foreseeable future). I think I just need 8 TB SATA drives to get far more reasonable... so probably a ways off still.

And wow, after seeing some of the above posts, I feel a little less bad about the few HDDs/SSDs I have sitting around doing nothing.

Right now, I think HDDs below 4 TB don't even justify themselves, and I'd say that's moving towards 8 TB. I'm not saying using drives below that size isn't justified, but on the current buying market, I don't think it's all that worth buying sub-4TB HDDs because below those capacities, SSDs are just cheap. I'm sort of surprised 1 TB and 2 TB HDDs still exist really, but there's always going to be an ultra low budget part of the market and home consumers' space needs aren't growing as much anymore, so... I guess that's why they stuck around. It's just weird seeing the capacity range from 1 TB (or less?) to 20 TB+, it's such a wide range now. Above 8 TB is where you're forced into the NAS or enterprise drives and those quickly get more expensive. The price gap between the 8 TB Blue and the 12 TB Red makes me cry. That's 50% more space but it's another $110 on top of a $130 drive. Not far off from doubling. Usually the value always goes up when you spend more on HDDs. What gives?

I hope there's HDD advancement yet to come still because it's seemed like it's been slowing, and I hope multi-TB drives become much, much cheaper in the coming years. That's sort of why I was hoping SSDs wouldn't go back up in price because we need larger capacities of those to force HDD prices down too.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I will Run HDs as my 2ndary drives probably until I die

Same here UNLESS we have a breakthrough in solid-state storage that allows the same sizes or more at the same or lower price with the same or better durability(HDD sector durability is massively better that NAND cell durability).

 

[agent_x007]

Not long later, I got another pair of 640 GB drives (and gave the original 320 GB drives to family PCs), but now they were called "Blue". I'm having trouble finding it, but if anyone remembers the exact timeframe that Western Digital introduced the color nomenclature and discontinued the Caviar naming, it would have been then, but I know it was the late 2000s.

I used those four 640 GB as combined storage until around late 2020 to early 2021.

I'm pretty sure, those "Blue" 640GB drives you mentioned are also the ones I bought.
Last time I checked SMART on them (before retiring) :

I think I bought them in late 2008, but I might be remembering wrong...
Regardless, when new they worked in RAID0 (here's result from April 2009) :

Later (~2011), they were replaced by two HD502HJ 500GBs from Samsung (the "F3" line), which also were used in RAID0.

Both AAKSs went to my sister's PC for quite a few years (no RAID there) where at one point, SATA cable failed.
After I replaced it, I did this quick test on one of them :

Those are oldest drives I still own since new.

 

[Wasteland]

Yep, the first one is already in my basket, waiting for a discount notification (or my next pay check).

The Orico really looks nice with the aluminium case and everything, but it doesn't have a RAID 0/1 switch, and seems to support only 16 TB disks, while the other one does 20. If I make up my mind to spend this much money, at least I should make the most of it, I guess.

If those are your best options, I'd honestly skip the RAID. Tying yourself to a small hardware-RAID-over-USB device seems like a recipe for later regret. We spent a lot of time talking over disk reliability; well for what it's worth I'd be more concerned about the USB enclosure in this scenario.

Just buy a nice big disk, run the usual SMART tests*, and set up regular back ups. There's nothing wrong with single-disk volumes in a consumer-use-case environment. You can always put the disk into a RAID scheme later if the mood strikes.

If you're seeking an external RAID solution because you aren't sure whether you'll be running Windows or Linux, I feel you. Probably the ideal is a dedicated NAS, hosting (SMB/Samba) shares that don't care what OS you're running on your desktop computer. Any old hardware would do, really. If you're anything like me, you probably have enough spare parts lying around to build it tonight, lol. But I understand if you don't want to go through all that effort. Setting up the hardware is trivial for any TPU regular, but everything afterwards is pretty daunting. You have to want to tinker with this stuff.

* - GSmartControl is among the best cross-platform GUI tools available for SMART testing. At a minimum, run a Short test and an Extended test on any drive you buy, before you put it in service.

 

[Pumper]

I have one 1TB drive for backups, but it's sitting disconnected in my PC, because the constant vibration drone is driving me nuts, even with all the added dampening.

 

[AusWolf]

If those are your best options, I'd honestly skip the RAID. Tying yourself to a small hardware-RAID-over-USB device seems like a recipe for later regret. We spent a lot of time talking over disk reliability; well for what it's worth I'd be more concerned about the USB enclosure in this scenario.

Just buy a nice big disk, run the usual SMART tests*, and set up regular back ups. There's nothing wrong with single-disk volumes in a consumer-use-case environment. You can always put the disk into a RAID scheme later if the mood strikes.

If you're seeking an external RAID solution because you aren't sure whether you'll be running Windows or Linux, I feel you. Probably the ideal is a dedicated NAS, hosting (SMB/Samba) shares that don't care what OS you're running on your desktop computer. Any old hardware would do, really. If you're anything like me, you probably have enough spare parts lying around to build it tonight, lol. But I understand if you don't want to go through all that effort. Setting up the hardware is trivial for any TPU regular, but everything afterwards is pretty daunting. You have to want to tinker with this stuff.

* - GSmartControl is among the best cross-platform GUI tools available for SMART testing. At a minimum, run a Short test and an Extended test on any drive you buy, before you put it in service.

To be honest, my first thought was only swapping my internal drives and setting up software RAID in Windows (I'm not sure if my motherboard supports hardware RAID, I'll have to check the manual). But then, if I make the swap over to Linux at some point, I'll have to do everything again. That's when Lex's idea came up, and to be fair, I think it's great. I never had an external enclosure fail on me, and I don't need it running 24/7, as I only use it for backups. That's why a NAS would be overkill for my needs, although I do have some parts lying around. I could also configure one of my HTPCs to do it, but nah. Too much electricity wasted.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Really, I looked earlier, didn't see it.

Correction, looks like they do, both in Blue and Black;

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/hdd/internal-hdd?filterByVvc-capacity=%3C+960+GB

Didn't come up earlier. I wonder why?

Western Digital had a temporary outage yesterday. A lot of stuff wouldn't respond.

 

[RaceT3ch]

I have a 1TB Apple HDD I recovered from a bunch of old office PCs from my workplace, they let me keep it since they have like 20tb's of hard drives now. It works perfectly fine and CrystalDisk says it's still in good condition despite being used over 8 years. I use it for simple programs and non-important images that doesn't need a lot of data.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I have a 1TB Apple HDD I recovered from a bunch of old office PCs from my workplace, they let me keep it

In the old skool, they would often give a hard drive to you!

But I don't know if they even would in the 2010s, especially since the very-late-2010s, much less expecting them to in the 2020s!

I honestly don't even know if they would sell used HDDs that are properly wiped and are in good condition here now. In the '00s, that was a normal practice! That was how I found out that Diamond Max 8s with model code 6Exxxxx are garbage.

 

[Bagerklestyne]

I've got 2tb off ssd in my main rig and 80tb of spinning rust in my nas.

I recall a 'boast' for lack of a better description from sandisk ceo about 3 years back that by 2025 SSD's would reach price parity with hard drives and we'd have 30tb drives in the enthusiast market. I think he's been to the same dealer musk uses. I mean granted large ssd's exist but they're not wallet friendly by any stretch.

Using a local a retailer I could get 80tb of rust for 2200 but it's 5200 for ssd's (and they're 1tb, which means a lot more drives)

 

[RaceT3ch]

In the old skool, they would often give a hard drive to you!

But I don't know if they even would in the 2010s, especially since the very-late-2010s, much less expecting them to in the 2020s!

I honestly don't even know if they would sell used HDDs that are properly wiped and are in good condition here now. In the '00s, that was a normal practice! That was how I found out that Diamond Max 8s with model code 6Exxxxx are garbage.

I mean, the more noteworthy thing they gave to me was a 1TB SATA SSD, also from a dead Office PC I stole it from.
Free storage though, I'm not gonna complain about 100 dollar's worth of storage given to me just because I rescued them from going to e-waste.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I mean, the more noteworthy thing they gave to me was a 1TB SATA SSD, also from a dead Office PC I stole it from.
Free storage though, I'm not gonna complain about 100 dollar's worth of storage given to me just because I rescued them from going to e-waste.

Now, especially in the 2020s, I suspect a bunch will ban leaving any HDDs in PCs! I wonder if the HDDs will be removed before being offered.
But, if so, that means paranoia, while they should have wiped the HDDs!

Additionally, I lately have been wondering if people are going off about drive serial codes, because of the purported Pentium III-processor-serial-number fiasco.

 

[RaceT3ch]

Now, especially in the 2020s, I suspect a bunch will ban leaving any HDDs in PCs! I wonder if the HDDs will be removed before being offered.

My workplace wouldn't even think about selling them, they'd rather make a NAS for themselves.

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

My workplace wouldn't even think about selling them, they'd rather make a NAS for themselves.

Here's off-the-charts-paranoia I predict that is possible: People who are "experts" will ban RAM from being sold with computers, due to a person falsely thinking that the RAM is retaining passwords!

 

[Athlonite]

I've got 3 remaining 1TB HDD's from WD that I use for storage in my PC I did have 4 until the repurposed 2TB Apple HDD (Seagate 2TB with a [Cr)apple firmware installed) suddenly decided it was not going to work right anymore
Looking at it's smart readings it had somehow reached 60 degrees celsius and cooked something as it took 4.5 days just to copy off 365GB of Audio books off of it
pretty shitty of it if you ask me seeing as none of the HDD's around it got as high as 45c I'm picking it was the apple FW's doing when drive reaches x power on hours commit suicide by self immolation
So now I'm on the hunt for a reasonably priced 4~8TB 7200rpm HDD to replace all of the HDD's left