this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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The title says basically everything but let me elaborate.

Given the recent news about the sold out of harddrives for the current year and possibly also the next years (tomshardware article) I try to buy the HDDs I want to use for the next few years earlier than expected.

I am on a really tight budget so I really don't want to overspend. I have an old tower PC laying around which I would like to turn into a DIY NAS probably with TrueNAS Scale.

I don't expect high loads, it will only be 1-2 users with medium writing and reading.

In this article from howtogeek the author talks about the differences and I get it, but a lot of the people commenting seem to be in a similar position as I am. Not really a lot of read-write load, only a few users, and many argue computing HDDs are fine for this use case.

Possibilites I came up with until now:

  1. Buy two pricey Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red HDDs and put them in RAID1
  2. Buy three cheaper Seagate Barracuda or WD Blue and put two in RAID1 and keep one as a backup if (or should I say when?) one of the used drives fails.

I am thankful for every comment or experience you might have with this topic!

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[–] glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 20 points 5 days ago (12 children)

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.

[–] fhein@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Now is a bad time to buy hard drives price-wise

It's a bit of a gamble, isn't it? At least here, HDDs appear to have gone up 10-20% compared to lowest prices last year, which isn't that much compared to SSDs and RAM. Personally I bought new disks last week just in case the prices continue to rise and I don't want to end up in a position where I have to buy new disks while they're at an all time high.

[–] bitsandburnouts@mastodon.cloud 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@fhein @glizzyguzzler two me about it, o just spent about twice what I was expecting on an ssd NAS build

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

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