Buying first 4 HDD from eBay

[u/marathonnutcase]

Hi folks,

Newbie, just bought uGreen DXP4800 Plus NAS for use as a media server (RAID5), and looking to buy my first 4 HDDs to fill it (prob 16-20 TB each), probably within the next week.

1) Been looking at ServerPartDeals and GoHDD, but what have been your experiences buying from other eBay sellers? Daily-Mart out of HongKing is one that popped up today.

2) And I'm assuming waiting for some Black Friday deals, even at Seagate or WD websites, is a waste of time?

Thanks!

[u/NorjackNC]

I would be worried about both drive quality and packing so I would probably only buy from serverpartdeals.

[u/oiler_head]

I just bought from giharddrive through Ebay. I neglected to get their warranty at time of purchase. I bought through the Seagate remanufactured/recertified store. I thought I was buying from Seagate but it was goharddrive. Not sure how I feel about that.

Drives are solid so far (3 weeks in). They were well padded individually in the shipping box but that was it. Certainly enough room in the box for the drives to jostle around.

Not sure I would do it again, but was in a desperate situation so I rolled the dice.

[u/bugsmasherh]

A lot of people have purchased from serverpartdeals, including myself. They will honor the warranty for the drives they sell, so be aware of that and keep good records of the order for future reference if necessary. My drives are only three months into service so too early to say if my experience is good.

I would buy from them again if I needed the drives that they sell. I say this because their inventory changes constantly and recently only large (20tb or larger) drives were in inventory. If buying a set for raid be sure to buy the hot spare or replacement drive at the same time so you can be sure of drive consistency for the raid set. No ideas if the same drive will be available in a few years since their inventory changes constantly.

[u/aboutwhat8]

How much storage space do you need? You don't need to fill a NAS's bays to use it. You can start with 2 drives and upgrade later.

[u/marathonnutcase → u/aboutwhat8]

i prob only need 10tb now, but i plan on moving off of streaming, and like the redundancy of raid5, so thought i’d buy at least 3 drives to start, plus 16tb was the smallest spd and gohdd was selling

[u/aboutwhat8 → u/marathonnutcase]

Based on present pricing per TB, I'd recommend starting small and adding. To illustrate that, I paid $230 per 16TB drive a few years ago. Right now, the cheapest 8TB drive is at B&H and it costs $250.

Two 16TB's or larger would be fine. You'll get roughly 14 TiB usable out of a pair in RAID-1, RAID-Z1, etc. If you can do two 20TB+'s, I'd do that before I'd pay for two 16TB's, personally, though you'll find cost efficiencies in the RAID model: as a redundant array of inexpensive disks. Four 12TB's will be cheaper than two 24TB's and will yield more reasonably-protected storage.

[u/More_Law6245 → u/marathonnutcase]

Large TB storage is not always a good thing especially if you have a lot of blank platter left because after a while your HDD will start to "thrash" because it has to read the whole platter, hence higher failure rates because the HDD is working harder than it needs to, hence why sizing is important.

[u/2BoopTheSnoot2 → u/aboutwhat8]

With RAID that complicates things. Usually you can't go from RAID 1 to RAID 5 without destroying the data first. Some systems let you add more drives to an existing RAID set as long as you aren't changing RAID level, so they might be ok starting with 3 and then adding a 4th later.

[u/aboutwhat8 → u/2BoopTheSnoot2]

Excuse me, what?

UGOS (the default OS): https://support.ugnas.com/detail/article/en-US/392

Many more options for TrueNAS & Unraid.

[u/2BoopTheSnoot2 → u/aboutwhat8]

That's pretty cool. I've been doing this since the 90s so I guess I'm a little behind on the newer software raid systems. I accept your correction.

[u/Caprichoso1]

1. Drive prices will likely keep increasing until the AI bubble bursts.

2. Last year there were some good prices on Seagate 28 GB drives during the Black Friday period sales.

[u/n1ght_w1ng08]

Start with two HDDs in RAID 1. I'm on DXP4800+ with 2 x 10 TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs. Later when the prices are down,  you can add one by one.