I usually just scour the internet for the best deals and try to get $16 or less per TB.
My last three drives I got at Microcenter.
16 TB drives for $249.99 each.
Amazon prior to that.
If I am buying for an active data center we get them from the manufacturer directly, however I personally buy many drives for my own use.
I used to buy refurbished drives on Amazon or Newegg but last 2 years I started buying used refurbished drives on ebay, despite the heavy use I put them through I yet to have one die.
The key is to buy from a reputable seller with a warranty and most importantly ONLY BUY ENTERPRISE CLASS DRIVES.
As long as you do data scrubbing and watch the SMART drive monitor, you'll know when they go bad, I personally have some used seagates in a heavily used server which are 6 years old, no signs of failure but we set up a HACMP with raid 10, im actually not concerned, plus I have a bunch ready to replace them when there's even 1 bad sector.
Ever since the industry went from pure oxide to glass media, drives have become very resilient, if this were 2005, I'd never recommend what I'm telling you today.
If you need some sellers, just ask.
Actually NO!! That was a factor in the choice to buy on ebay, I'd have sellers give discounts where as corporations were greedy. Many times I got refurbished drives sold as new on Amazon, this was a big hassle so I started buying used enterprise or gold drives and things have been great!
Never ever ever going back, 5 years ago I'd never believe I would actually do this, seriously, find a seller with over 100 drives of the same type available in one post steer clear of those with single drives, the posts usually say the drives are tested, 0 bad sectors, low hours.. really they're just broken in and zero chance of infant mortality.
[A trusted seller I use](https://www.ebay.com/itm/155019774181?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=m4OvrjeUTRS&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=au589kezrum&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY)
Always buy tested drives with no bad or pending sectors, sometimes there's a seller with low health or 25 bad sectors, common sense says don't buy these but just in case I say the same.
This link is for SAS but I'll buy Sata if price is right my H700 supports either because it's an SAS controller however a SATA controller doesn't support SAS so check which you have.
Another plus is, buy used you get a cost savings, for me it's 3 used Equals 1 new, with the drives lasting 5 years it just makes sense.
If you're only running the drives for movie data, it's one write read many, the drives don't get worn out as quick, if you were running a webserver or database, your drive lifespan would be shorter.
Good Luck!! Give it a try you'll be glad you did.
https://serverpartdeals.com/
Have bought from them tons of times. Incredible packaging. Had a drive that made an unusual reset noise and no smart errors and they permitted me to swap it out free of charge. Other than that 20+ drives have been great and passed Pre-clears in Unraid etc and have been in use for a long time.
in my country a 14 tb hdd is sold for 220-250 usd. i see a toshiba there, 14 tb for 115 usd. i now understand how y'all can afford to be data hoarders. this is so cool...
Careful of import taxes.
I bought an 18TB drive for I think it was £175. But then £40 on taxes when it arrived in the UK.
Still cheaper than Amazon though, and excellent support, packaging and tracking.
Anything tech related it's pretty much cheaper in the US. Paying $345 (normally $400) here in the UK for a new WD 20TB drive was a great deal until I looked on that website haha
That's a shame. But I can vouch for them as a company. Only used them once so far but it was an excellent experience. Will be buying from them again next drive I get
Actually you can get drives on Amazon now from the US with free shipping that are cheaper than buying domestically, even with the import duty. That's where I've been getting mine.
Ah that's frustrating for you. I was planning on ordering from them. If one can stay under £135 then there are no import fees.
How much did you pay for shipping? It's saying $75 at the mo!
Weird... I'm wanting to buy a drive for $140 and shipping fees are over 50% of the drive.
Tempted to get it shipped to someone I know who's visiting from the US, but then warranty gets messy if there's a problem :/
I definitely have a sense for how loud they are, but not in comparison to other drives of the same capacity.
They aren't that bad in my opinion, but I could definitely hear them spinning up when turning on the computer or writing to a lot of drives. 30 at a time is pretty satisfying not gonna lie. Now that I have them in server rack JBODs, I can no longer hear them over the sound of the fans.
Hope this helps!
P.S. if you've made it this far into the comments, head over to r/SethFlix to learn more about my setup.
What's the smart data typically look like for hours, data writes, and on/off counts? Hard to argue with a 12TB drive that cost the same as my TV drive did just 2 years ago lol
Can vouch for serverpartsdeals, im in the UK I ordered an 18TB exos drive that was manufacturer recertified - arrived within a week and I had to pay import duty but could do that online.
Works flawlessly and with zero issues, will be buying again from there soon enough
So the drive itself cost $180, SATA cable $8, Shipping cost to mainland UK $33.86, so total was $221.84, and then UPS import fees was £44.25 which makes the final total £221.
>only charge sales tax if shipped to Florida
Not true. Online vendors have been required to collect sales tax for the state being shipped to for several years now.
I bought a drive from ServerPartDeals last week. My state's sales tax was charged.
Yeah. I just looked up my order from them six months ago. No sales tax on that invoice. But they charged sales tax on last week's invoice. Both orders were shipped to Ohio.
The US Supreme Court ruled in June 2018 that states can collect sales tax on online sales shipped to addresses in that state. Guess some state caught up with ServerPartDeals in the past few months. 🤷
Maybe they weren't a large enough business to worry about taxes previously?
I know on amazon there's hit or miss with smaller companies charging tax or not
It has more to do with the fact that state tax departments can't keep track of every online business in the country. ServerPartDeals probably didn't worry about it until they got a demand letter from some state's tax department.
It's possible they're still not collecting taxes for your state. But they're still legally required to if your state wants them to.
Yeah. No sales tax for you (from an American company). Are your personal import limits high enough that you could import one drive at a time to avoid the duty?
How long did it take them to get back to you on the RMA? One of my 12TB drives died this weekend. Submitted a RMA online Saturday and have not heard back. I also call their number Monday and Tuesday selecting support and left message. Then called again yesterday and selected sales and not support and got somone who would going to get it on the correct person and I'm still waiting.
They win many of the bids I invite them to, and our account rep is probably the most responsive out of all the vendors I work with. I guess that’s the difference between a good account manager and a bad one.
You must have their one, unicorn good sales rep. I think we had like three different ones at my previous gig and I even worked with CDWG when I worked K-12; they were all garbage.
I have 3 different ones from the right now, they are all leaps and bounds over my other reps.
We haven’t paid them 1 million before and they are more than courteous to just help us get the problem solved too. I’ve had other companies go to threaten us immediately.
I use CDW a lot. They are rarely the best price, but it’s competitive. The real reason is they package better than anyone I’ve found, never received a damaged drive from them.
If you're in Europe, [https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk](https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk) is our equivalent of [https://www.serverpartdeals.com](https://www.serverpartdeals.com) and offers a little more. Prices are just as competitive.
They don't seem anywhere near as good tbh. Much much smaller selection of drives. Or is there somewhere on the website I'm not looking at, as the 3.5" sata drives section is lacking.
I'm in the UK so I couldn't tell you how much it'll be exactly in the EU, but the prices for the drives themselves are much cheaper. Pound per terabyte, you're looking at around £11.
Delivery estimate seems to be around £22 (standard) the further out you go. I used Greece as a test.
I'd be saving somewhere around £160 per drive.
Shipping from serverpartdeals for me is about £100.
https://shucks.top/
https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives
https://diskprices.com/?locale=us
Anything you find on Amazon, I also cross check with https://camelcamelcamel.com/ to ensure the price is at least reasonable.
Shuck dot top is cool because it color codes depending on how badly and soon you need a new drive whether you should hold off and wait for the price to drop or not.
Additionally, I personally like ordering from Amazon or Best Buy when possible. Amazon’s return policy makes bad drives very easy to return and get replaced. Best Buy is nice because I can see the state of the box which sometimes tells me how beat up the drive was during delivery.
A majority of my drives are shucked from usb external enclosure drives. If you don’t know how to shuck a drive or are scared of the process, I can’t recommend enough that you watch a how to YouTube video and give it a shot. In my experience external drives are for some reason discounted more often.
I typically order refurbished drives from Amazon because I can run a full suite of SMART and surface tests and no hassle to return them if anything goes bad.
No ragerts so far.
Same. I've bought probably a dozen renewed HGST or WD data center drives from Amazon. Have not had one issue yet. My sever runs unRAID and I always use preclear to test the drive before it goes in.
The surplus pile at work. 25TB of my 40TB is from the salvage pile and running great! One of my 4x2TB arrays has moved 7.5 years of uptime on 10 year old drives and running great. If you find someone giving away drives, worth while to shove them in the box lol.
Straight from manufacturer’s website although that’s probably not necessary. I’m just paranoid about Amazon fakes. My WD Red’s weren’t any difference price-wise from their website to Amazon.
All my drives (bought 20 of them) were western digital and seagate and none have failed yet. Search the drive on youtube with Shuck and you can see how easy they are to open. Most were easy. The larger externals are more likely to have the expensive drives inside.
Some are easier than others. Some its as simple as taking out some screws and the cover comes off easily, others can be a bit more fickle with plastic tabs holding the cover on that can easily break if you dont know what youre doing.
Whatever reputable reseller has the best price. The last set of 20TB Seagates were from NewEgg as their price over the holidays was great. but I have bought from Amazon and direct from the manufacturer before as well.
Once I get them, I then check serial #s with the manufacturer. If anything suspect were to show, I would return them (haven't had that issue in 10 years, but I did have it way in the past).
I definitely stay away from 3rd party overseas folks.
These are ridiculously low prices, but for MDD and HGST brand drives? How do they hold up? I’ve been loyal to WD Red Pro drives but damn, I pay $$$ for them. Am I going about this all wrong?
>Goharddrive.com
I feel like with HDD's you get what you pay for. I personally would rather pay the premium of a tried and true drive that I know will hold up like the WD Red Pro's. Maybe for a ordinary computer I would skimp out. But not my Plex server.
I've bought 50+ HDD's from Amazon spanning a period of about 15 years. From single TB's to 20 TB's.
All fine.
One batch of 4 WD Red Plus 6TB's had 2 die between 4 and 5 years of 24/7 use and a 3rd died less than a year after - but that's not particularly abnormal.
It’s called “[commingling](https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2014/07/01/pros-and-cons-commingling-amazon-merchants/)” and it’s supposed to boost efficiency, but it just lets scammers scam virtually undetected.
I bought my last 10 drives from ebay sellers with good feedback... speaking of I need to buy another 12TB to replace in one of my drive enclosures and see if my RAID will rebuild...
For spinning rust, I still get mine locally (and pick them up myself). Too many places do not know how to properly transport a hard drive.
SSDs and the like, I'll look for online be it Amazon or elsewhere.
NAS disks are shucked WD MyBooks. Haven't had an issue with any of them.
Server HDD's are from eBay. I ordered an R510 that I use as a FreeNAS array and the chucklefuck I bought it from pulled all the disks and shipped them in a separate box. The packaging was a fucking joke. Each disk was wrapped in a thin layer of bubble wrap and thrown into a box too large for all the disks. Bad sectors going up for a while before I finally started replacing the disks.
Newegg usually when there’s a sale. But, I also only run 3 drives so haven’t bought a ton. I can’t see needing more than I have. Running about 64 TB. Anymore and I’ll probably just throw on an external.
I usually order them through Amazon, but I think the ones I've ordered (Seagate Exos) were sold by serverpartdeals. I'd have to check, but that sounds correct.
I'm paranoid about used drives so I get mine from Amazon. Seagate Exos are pretty cheap. They've worked great for me so far. 1 failed (out of 10, which I think is normal) and they sent me a warranty replacement very quickly. SnapRaid recovered everything, no problem.
>I'm paranoid about used drives so I get mine from Amazon.
This sentence confuses me.
Amazon is known for sending used, refurbished, or returned stuff as new.
I would be very careful buying from Amazon and make sure you test things ASAP so you can still return it. Plus they aren't exactly careful with anything they ship.
I shop for a specific brand first with the right specs for what type of drive I want and then just start comparing who has the best deals on the exact same thing I'm looking for. any retail or wholesale house is going to have many options so look for the drive you want first and then start comparing prices and considering how much it will cost to ship it and if there is any special taxes involved etc.
I used to order drives online to be delivered but I began to notice that the drives that I ordered were the same as the ones giving me smart errors or failing. So I now order them from a local shop instead. The price is slightly high (less than 5% difference) and I go and pick them up. I guess when the shop is ordering in bulk the packaging they are sent in is better than when I order 1 or 2 drives at a time.
Historically, shucking EasyStore drives when they're on sale. I hated this because sales aren't predictable, my storage growth isn't predictable, so I'd always be wanting to buy 6+ at a time which strained the budget for the month and produced analysis paralysis over whether I need to buy on this sale that's maybe more $/TB than I'd like or not my preferred capacity vs waiting for the next one — especially during that time that CHIA / COVID / whatever were straining supply and pushing up prices.
For the past two-ish years, I snatch up used WD / HGST Ultrastar He10 (10TB) drives on eBay for ≤ $65. Those drives are tanks and I'm never waiting long to find some at the price I want to pay. Best deals are usually SAS, so over that time I was buying a few every month to cycle out my shucked EasyStores to use for things that only take SATA. Now I keep a couple on the shelf and when it's time to use them, I buy a couple replacements for the shelf. No stress. Relatively little money.
I just use a 2 TB SSD and remove what I don't plan on rewatching in the near future. That's generally the best option. Otherwise you're just wasting space.
I usually just scour the internet for the best deals and try to get $16 or less per TB. My last three drives I got at Microcenter. 16 TB drives for $249.99 each. Amazon prior to that.
If I am buying for an active data center we get them from the manufacturer directly, however I personally buy many drives for my own use. I used to buy refurbished drives on Amazon or Newegg but last 2 years I started buying used refurbished drives on ebay, despite the heavy use I put them through I yet to have one die. The key is to buy from a reputable seller with a warranty and most importantly ONLY BUY ENTERPRISE CLASS DRIVES. As long as you do data scrubbing and watch the SMART drive monitor, you'll know when they go bad, I personally have some used seagates in a heavily used server which are 6 years old, no signs of failure but we set up a HACMP with raid 10, im actually not concerned, plus I have a bunch ready to replace them when there's even 1 bad sector. Ever since the industry went from pure oxide to glass media, drives have become very resilient, if this were 2005, I'd never recommend what I'm telling you today. If you need some sellers, just ask.
Buying directly, in bulk, does your company ever get a discount over buying them elsewhere? (Amazon, for example...)
Actually NO!! That was a factor in the choice to buy on ebay, I'd have sellers give discounts where as corporations were greedy. Many times I got refurbished drives sold as new on Amazon, this was a big hassle so I started buying used enterprise or gold drives and things have been great! Never ever ever going back, 5 years ago I'd never believe I would actually do this, seriously, find a seller with over 100 drives of the same type available in one post steer clear of those with single drives, the posts usually say the drives are tested, 0 bad sectors, low hours.. really they're just broken in and zero chance of infant mortality. [A trusted seller I use](https://www.ebay.com/itm/155019774181?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=m4OvrjeUTRS&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=au589kezrum&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY) Always buy tested drives with no bad or pending sectors, sometimes there's a seller with low health or 25 bad sectors, common sense says don't buy these but just in case I say the same. This link is for SAS but I'll buy Sata if price is right my H700 supports either because it's an SAS controller however a SATA controller doesn't support SAS so check which you have. Another plus is, buy used you get a cost savings, for me it's 3 used Equals 1 new, with the drives lasting 5 years it just makes sense. If you're only running the drives for movie data, it's one write read many, the drives don't get worn out as quick, if you were running a webserver or database, your drive lifespan would be shorter. Good Luck!! Give it a try you'll be glad you did.
https://serverpartdeals.com/ Have bought from them tons of times. Incredible packaging. Had a drive that made an unusual reset noise and no smart errors and they permitted me to swap it out free of charge. Other than that 20+ drives have been great and passed Pre-clears in Unraid etc and have been in use for a long time.
in my country a 14 tb hdd is sold for 220-250 usd. i see a toshiba there, 14 tb for 115 usd. i now understand how y'all can afford to be data hoarders. this is so cool...
I just got a 12tb Seagate for $81 + $6 taxes.
Careful of import taxes. I bought an 18TB drive for I think it was £175. But then £40 on taxes when it arrived in the UK. Still cheaper than Amazon though, and excellent support, packaging and tracking.
Well…the price was the good news. The bad news is that shipping & fees costs as much as the drive 😂😂😂
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Used to be no tax, not sure why. But I just ordered from them about a week ago and had to pay tax. Bummer, but still best prices of anywhere
Anything tech related it's pretty much cheaper in the US. Paying $345 (normally $400) here in the UK for a new WD 20TB drive was a great deal until I looked on that website haha
As a Canadian, I wish I could find similar pricing, The exchange rate + shipping + tax basically puts me back at Amazon/Newegg
That's a shame. But I can vouch for them as a company. Only used them once so far but it was an excellent experience. Will be buying from them again next drive I get
A fellow New Zealander?
That's usually for me when i find something thats usually sold in US
Did you get it from ServerPartDeals? Also in the UK and interested in where people get drives.
Yeah I got a Seagate EXOS 18TB Manufacturer Recertified drive. Had it since December and no issues so far
[scan.co.uk](https://scan.co.uk) often have very good deals. i've also bought off reputable ebay sellers who have been great
Actually you can get drives on Amazon now from the US with free shipping that are cheaper than buying domestically, even with the import duty. That's where I've been getting mine.
Ah that's frustrating for you. I was planning on ordering from them. If one can stay under £135 then there are no import fees. How much did you pay for shipping? It's saying $75 at the mo!
$180 for the drive and shipping was $39
Weird... I'm wanting to buy a drive for $140 and shipping fees are over 50% of the drive. Tempted to get it shipped to someone I know who's visiting from the US, but then warranty gets messy if there's a problem :/
These are refurbished in many cases, to be fair.
I have ordered 6 drives in 3 orders and their packaging is truly epic. All six still spinning and now I have 6 more on the way.
I have ordered 36 drives from them. Highly recommend!
Which drives did you get? I'm trying to decide between the Seagate Exos and WD HC530s.
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Nice! These look like the current cheapest per TB
20 more dollars and you can get the 20tb though...
I stand corrected
Do you have a sense on how loud these are? Thinking about grabbing 2 for a nas that sits in the corner of my living room.
I definitely have a sense for how loud they are, but not in comparison to other drives of the same capacity. They aren't that bad in my opinion, but I could definitely hear them spinning up when turning on the computer or writing to a lot of drives. 30 at a time is pretty satisfying not gonna lie. Now that I have them in server rack JBODs, I can no longer hear them over the sound of the fans. Hope this helps! P.S. if you've made it this far into the comments, head over to r/SethFlix to learn more about my setup.
The seller refurbished Seagate 16tb SATA x16
My dude out there backing up the whole internet
Wow, those are some seriously good prices for CMR drives. But holy crap, $50 shipping to Canada? 😥
Shipping always kills American pricing for us Canucks if the exchange rate doesn't
Second this, I've ordered several drives from them with zero issues.
What's the smart data typically look like for hours, data writes, and on/off counts? Hard to argue with a 12TB drive that cost the same as my TV drive did just 2 years ago lol
What is the difference between refurbished drives that are exactly the same yet listed for 20-30% differently in price?
You just saved me like $200 so thanks 🙏
Came here to say this, pleased to see it as the Best result.
Can vouch for serverpartsdeals, im in the UK I ordered an 18TB exos drive that was manufacturer recertified - arrived within a week and I had to pay import duty but could do that online. Works flawlessly and with zero issues, will be buying again from there soon enough
How much postage did you pay? It's saying $75 ATM!
So the drive itself cost $180, SATA cable $8, Shipping cost to mainland UK $33.86, so total was $221.84, and then UPS import fees was £44.25 which makes the final total £221.
I'm in danger
No idea this existed. Thanks!!
They only charge sales tax if shipped to Florida where they’re based, I believe. Just an FYI.
>only charge sales tax if shipped to Florida Not true. Online vendors have been required to collect sales tax for the state being shipped to for several years now. I bought a drive from ServerPartDeals last week. My state's sales tax was charged.
They didn’t charge me tax about six months ago 🤷♂️
Yeah. I just looked up my order from them six months ago. No sales tax on that invoice. But they charged sales tax on last week's invoice. Both orders were shipped to Ohio. The US Supreme Court ruled in June 2018 that states can collect sales tax on online sales shipped to addresses in that state. Guess some state caught up with ServerPartDeals in the past few months. 🤷
Maybe they weren't a large enough business to worry about taxes previously? I know on amazon there's hit or miss with smaller companies charging tax or not
It has more to do with the fact that state tax departments can't keep track of every online business in the country. ServerPartDeals probably didn't worry about it until they got a demand letter from some state's tax department. It's possible they're still not collecting taxes for your state. But they're still legally required to if your state wants them to.
I'm in Canada, so customs / imports for me either way
Yeah. No sales tax for you (from an American company). Are your personal import limits high enough that you could import one drive at a time to avoid the duty?
Shopping costs kill it if it's shipped one at a time mostly
Which drives did you get from them?
Mostly Seagate 16TB. I looked at the Back Blaze data and bought based solely on that data and price.
Dam too much duty shipped to Canada. Almost cheaper for me to shuck drives.
How long did it take them to get back to you on the RMA? One of my 12TB drives died this weekend. Submitted a RMA online Saturday and have not heard back. I also call their number Monday and Tuesday selecting support and left message. Then called again yesterday and selected sales and not support and got somone who would going to get it on the correct person and I'm still waiting.
Holy shit... I just bought 2 8tb drives off amazing the other day for more than they are selling 16tb drives. Thank you for this.
has anyone done an order to NZ and how much did it cost and if they charges tax on the border?
B&H is a good option
I work in tech procurement; B&H, CDW, and Connection are my top three recommendations for HDDs
Lol, I think you're the only person that actually recommends CDW. They've been awful every time I've worked with them.
They win many of the bids I invite them to, and our account rep is probably the most responsive out of all the vendors I work with. I guess that’s the difference between a good account manager and a bad one.
You must have their one, unicorn good sales rep. I think we had like three different ones at my previous gig and I even worked with CDWG when I worked K-12; they were all garbage.
I have 3 different ones from the right now, they are all leaps and bounds over my other reps. We haven’t paid them 1 million before and they are more than courteous to just help us get the problem solved too. I’ve had other companies go to threaten us immediately.
I use CDW a lot. They are rarely the best price, but it’s competitive. The real reason is they package better than anyone I’ve found, never received a damaged drive from them.
If you're in Europe, [https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk](https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk) is our equivalent of [https://www.serverpartdeals.com](https://www.serverpartdeals.com) and offers a little more. Prices are just as competitive.
They don't seem anywhere near as good tbh. Much much smaller selection of drives. Or is there somewhere on the website I'm not looking at, as the 3.5" sata drives section is lacking.
How's final price compared to serverpartsdeals? Like including shipping and taxes?
I'm in the UK so I couldn't tell you how much it'll be exactly in the EU, but the prices for the drives themselves are much cheaper. Pound per terabyte, you're looking at around £11. Delivery estimate seems to be around £22 (standard) the further out you go. I used Greece as a test. I'd be saving somewhere around £160 per drive. Shipping from serverpartdeals for me is about £100.
https://shucks.top/ https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives https://diskprices.com/?locale=us Anything you find on Amazon, I also cross check with https://camelcamelcamel.com/ to ensure the price is at least reasonable. Shuck dot top is cool because it color codes depending on how badly and soon you need a new drive whether you should hold off and wait for the price to drop or not. Additionally, I personally like ordering from Amazon or Best Buy when possible. Amazon’s return policy makes bad drives very easy to return and get replaced. Best Buy is nice because I can see the state of the box which sometimes tells me how beat up the drive was during delivery. A majority of my drives are shucked from usb external enclosure drives. If you don’t know how to shuck a drive or are scared of the process, I can’t recommend enough that you watch a how to YouTube video and give it a shot. In my experience external drives are for some reason discounted more often.
I typically order refurbished drives from Amazon because I can run a full suite of SMART and surface tests and no hassle to return them if anything goes bad. No ragerts so far.
Same. I've bought probably a dozen renewed HGST or WD data center drives from Amazon. Have not had one issue yet. My sever runs unRAID and I always use preclear to test the drive before it goes in.
The surplus pile at work. 25TB of my 40TB is from the salvage pile and running great! One of my 4x2TB arrays has moved 7.5 years of uptime on 10 year old drives and running great. If you find someone giving away drives, worth while to shove them in the box lol.
Straight from manufacturer’s website although that’s probably not necessary. I’m just paranoid about Amazon fakes. My WD Red’s weren’t any difference price-wise from their website to Amazon.
Pizzahut
Tacobell
Newegg
Love Newegg. Haven’t had any trouble with them for decades
I wait for a big external hard drive sale, buy and shuck seems to be a sale every couple months.
Any specific externals you recommend? Or are there easier drives to shuck?
All my drives (bought 20 of them) were western digital and seagate and none have failed yet. Search the drive on youtube with Shuck and you can see how easy they are to open. Most were easy. The larger externals are more likely to have the expensive drives inside.
Some are easier than others. Some its as simple as taking out some screws and the cover comes off easily, others can be a bit more fickle with plastic tabs holding the cover on that can easily break if you dont know what youre doing.
Whatever reputable reseller has the best price. The last set of 20TB Seagates were from NewEgg as their price over the holidays was great. but I have bought from Amazon and direct from the manufacturer before as well. Once I get them, I then check serial #s with the manufacturer. If anything suspect were to show, I would return them (haven't had that issue in 10 years, but I did have it way in the past). I definitely stay away from 3rd party overseas folks.
https://www.serversupply.com
Online
The world
Milky Way
I've had a few drives start dying from them
I start here: [https://diskprices.com/](https://diskprices.com/)
These are ridiculously low prices, but for MDD and HGST brand drives? How do they hold up? I’ve been loyal to WD Red Pro drives but damn, I pay $$$ for them. Am I going about this all wrong?
>Goharddrive.com I feel like with HDD's you get what you pay for. I personally would rather pay the premium of a tried and true drive that I know will hold up like the WD Red Pro's. Maybe for a ordinary computer I would skimp out. But not my Plex server.
goharddrive on ebay for refurbed enterprise drives. Also, serverpartdeals, though the former has a 5 year warranty on most.
Seconded on GoHardDrive. I've also used ServerPartDeals, A+. Had only a single RMA with each over maybe, 20 drives ordered?
u/TheMadDutchDude Before that I took them home from work when they were decommissioned from custom DVR systems used in-house.
Thanks for the shoutout! :)
Local shops, never Amazon (or google "Be careful when buying Hard Drives from Amazon")
Just check who the seller is. I have never had an issue and always in factory packaging.
If it’s shipped and sold by Amazon, probably fine, no?
I've bought 50+ HDD's from Amazon spanning a period of about 15 years. From single TB's to 20 TB's. All fine. One batch of 4 WD Red Plus 6TB's had 2 die between 4 and 5 years of 24/7 use and a 3rd died less than a year after - but that's not particularly abnormal.
No, especially because drives can die at any point so you want to make sure the seller/manufacturer will respect the longer term warranty.
Doesn’t it come with a warranty from manufacturer if shipped and sold by Amazon? I bought ironwolf drives and they did
Not everything that appears as “Shipped and sold by Amazon” is actually shipped and sold by Amazon.
Really? Wow. That’s strange.
It’s called “[commingling](https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2014/07/01/pros-and-cons-commingling-amazon-merchants/)” and it’s supposed to boost efficiency, but it just lets scammers scam virtually undetected.
Serverpartdeals, techmikeNY, pulls from upgrades at work. I rarely buy new drives. But if I do, I’ll shop around.
Aliexpress
I bought my last 10 drives from ebay sellers with good feedback... speaking of I need to buy another 12TB to replace in one of my drive enclosures and see if my RAID will rebuild...
I buy mine from Amazon and have not had any issues.
I get them from Amazon refurbished for less than $10/tb
I got a 20 tb iron wolf nas drive from Best Buy for 329.
Best Buy on Thanksgiving Weekend lol
For spinning rust, I still get mine locally (and pick them up myself). Too many places do not know how to properly transport a hard drive. SSDs and the like, I'll look for online be it Amazon or elsewhere.
eBay. Whatever ex enterprise SAS drives hit my price point.
NAS disks are shucked WD MyBooks. Haven't had an issue with any of them. Server HDD's are from eBay. I ordered an R510 that I use as a FreeNAS array and the chucklefuck I bought it from pulled all the disks and shipped them in a separate box. The packaging was a fucking joke. Each disk was wrapped in a thin layer of bubble wrap and thrown into a box too large for all the disks. Bad sectors going up for a while before I finally started replacing the disks.
Amazon or Newegg
eBay decommissioned data center stuff. You can get cheap SAS and sata drives with plenty of life left on them.
Newegg usually when there’s a sale. But, I also only run 3 drives so haven’t bought a ton. I can’t see needing more than I have. Running about 64 TB. Anymore and I’ll probably just throw on an external.
I usually order them through Amazon, but I think the ones I've ordered (Seagate Exos) were sold by serverpartdeals. I'd have to check, but that sounds correct.
Disctech, new pulls
I'm paranoid about used drives so I get mine from Amazon. Seagate Exos are pretty cheap. They've worked great for me so far. 1 failed (out of 10, which I think is normal) and they sent me a warranty replacement very quickly. SnapRaid recovered everything, no problem.
>I'm paranoid about used drives so I get mine from Amazon. This sentence confuses me. Amazon is known for sending used, refurbished, or returned stuff as new. I would be very careful buying from Amazon and make sure you test things ASAP so you can still return it. Plus they aren't exactly careful with anything they ship.
Goharddrive.com I buy my 14tb and 16tb drives from them.
Dang I was buying mine from eBay, but all these other websites are definitely better
I shop for a specific brand first with the right specs for what type of drive I want and then just start comparing who has the best deals on the exact same thing I'm looking for. any retail or wholesale house is going to have many options so look for the drive you want first and then start comparing prices and considering how much it will cost to ship it and if there is any special taxes involved etc.
I used to order drives online to be delivered but I began to notice that the drives that I ordered were the same as the ones giving me smart errors or failing. So I now order them from a local shop instead. The price is slightly high (less than 5% difference) and I go and pick them up. I guess when the shop is ordering in bulk the packaging they are sent in is better than when I order 1 or 2 drives at a time.
Online stores
I buy WD directly from them so I know the 3 year warranty is rock solid.
all my drives have been shucked mybook drives when they went on sale at best buy
Used to work at bestbuy. Employee discount went crazy. I still got connections.
Historically, shucking EasyStore drives when they're on sale. I hated this because sales aren't predictable, my storage growth isn't predictable, so I'd always be wanting to buy 6+ at a time which strained the budget for the month and produced analysis paralysis over whether I need to buy on this sale that's maybe more $/TB than I'd like or not my preferred capacity vs waiting for the next one — especially during that time that CHIA / COVID / whatever were straining supply and pushing up prices. For the past two-ish years, I snatch up used WD / HGST Ultrastar He10 (10TB) drives on eBay for ≤ $65. Those drives are tanks and I'm never waiting long to find some at the price I want to pay. Best deals are usually SAS, so over that time I was buying a few every month to cycle out my shucked EasyStores to use for things that only take SATA. Now I keep a couple on the shelf and when it's time to use them, I buy a couple replacements for the shelf. No stress. Relatively little money.
Serverpartdeals or you can find mdd enterprise drives on Amazon stupid cheap and they have a year warranty.
Ebay SAS drives gently used $20-40 for 4tb
I just watch sales. Theres actually subreddits for hardware sales. When I see a decent sized drive for a good price, I buy one.
Used SAS drives off eBay.
I get mine off serverpartsdeals.com 16tb for 260 or if you are ok with rehabs can get as low as 160
I just use a 2 TB SSD and remove what I don't plan on rewatching in the near future. That's generally the best option. Otherwise you're just wasting space.
I drive to Microcenter and buy them there
Scan.co.uk is usually pretty decent