I’m sketching the idea of building a NAS in my home, using a USB RAID enclosure (which may eventually turn into a proper NAS enclosure).
I haven’t got the enclosure yet but that’s not that big of a deal, right now I’m thinking whether to buy HDDs for the storage (currently have none) to setup RAID, but I cannot find good deals on HDDs.
I found on reddit that people were buying high capacity drives for as low as $15/TB, e.g. paying $100 for 10/12TB drives, but nowadays it’s just impossible to find drives at a bargain price, thanks to AI datacenters, I guess.
In Europe I’ve heard of datablocks.dev where you can buy white-label or recertified Seagate disks, sometimes you can find refurbished drives in eBay, but I can’t find these bargain deals everyone seemed to have up until last year?
For example, is 134 EUR for a 6TB refurbished Toshiba HDD a good price, considering the price hikes? What price per TB should I be looking for to consider the drives cheap? Where else can I search for these cheap drives?
Just keep in mind that the rebuild time for RAID 6 grows with drive size. A 6TB drive takes 1.4 days to rebuild, an 8TB drive takes 1.8 days, and a 10TB drive takes 2.3 days. So when a drive fails you might have a lot of downtime.
Here’s the calculator I used in case anyone asks or has a more accurate option to recommend: https://cal67.calculator.city/raid-rebuild-time-calculator.html
Also, apparently this is a best case scenario. If you’re still having the server run you could see rebuild times up to 10x this.
That being said, it you stagger your drive life (aka add or prematurely replace 1 drive per year) you can further minimize risk of 2-3 drives going down all at the same time, so a yearly rebuild in the background shouldn’t be too bad
Raid 6 takes longer to rebuild but not twice as long, more like 45-50% longer. And raid 5 can’t tolerate another drive failure during the rebuild. With new drives I do use raid 5 (z1), but with used drives I’d want that extra assurance.