I just grabbed a pair of 18TB Seagate Exos SATA drives - surprisingly quiet for what they are.

Any difference between them? Any concern for going with cheapest option within a size class?

Thanks for this.

Fully agree.

I’ve purchased refurb drives from both them and GoHardDrive.com. So far I’m 5/5 for a mix of Exos and HGST Ultrastar drives working perfectly out of the box.

Anytime these drives pop up on Slickdeals, the thread is full of 3 types of people: People who have never bought a refurb/recert drive but insist they are all going to burn your house down, people who have bought several with no issue, and people who have received a failing drive that the seller promptly replaced.

Last time someone mentioned these on Lemmy I got one.

It “crashed” according to Synology in about a week. Woke me up in the middle of the night with the Synology beeping.

Used to run over 40 drives. Backblaze pointed out those Toshiba’s. Man they do not die.

Second this. What you need for high quality media is space, not speed. For any single stream, network and drive will be fast enough anyway. Your typical HDD offers like 4-6 times the bandwidth that a regular Blu-ray can provide. You can get 8TB HDDs for the price of 2TB SSDs. Random access doesn’t matter for that application.

You might want to invest in redundancy and use a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array, depends on how valuable that media is to you or how long it would take to recover in case it’s lost. A simple solution would be a btrfs software RAID, in case your are after something like a Linux home media server with Jellyfin.

yeah that's what I was thinking. how complex is it to set up raid on linux?

sudo mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/sdx /dev/sdy # Create raid array with BTRFS
sudo mkdir /mnt/storage # Create your mount directory
echo "/dev/sdx /mnt/storage btrfs noatime,compress=zstd 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab # Set raid array to mount at boot
sudo mount -t btrfs -o noatime,compress=zstd /dev/sdx /mnt/storage # Manually mount the first time

If you live in a high energy cost area the ROI on going SSD can be as low as 3-4 years

~$800 on two 8tb SSDs

2 x 8tb HDDs is roughly $200USD

I don’t know what kind of electricity prices you’re paying, but to hit a 3 year ROI on your SSDs, you’re paying at least $2.2USD/kWh, assuming the full 15W (232kWh/year total) consumption of the HDDs and assuming negligible power consumption from the SSDs.

Edit: average power consumption for HDDs read/write operation is usually around what you claim them to idle at, with actual idle consumption below.

Edit2: and to be fair I did take refurb HDD price. a refurb SSD is around $300 USD for 8tb, bringing the minimum power cost per kWh down to ~$1.7USD/kWh for a 3 year ROI.

Does no one care about power consumption?

It takes several SSDs to make up the capacity difference between an HDD.

I run 62 16TB HDDs. To make up the same capacity in SSDs I need 2-4x the bays. I don’t know of any cheap systems that can hold ~250 bays of ssds.

So an SSD that may only take 1-3w all day… 2-4x that is already equal to the HDD regardless. You’re not going to make any ROI metric here.

Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.

8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.

But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.