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?
but nowadays it’s just impossible to find drives at a bargain price, thanks to AI datacenters, I guess.
You answered your own question.
that’s dumb. there are still better and worse prices
My hard drives have more than doubled in cost in 6 months.
Fuck data centers.
I checked my receipts and the used 14TB WD Ultrastars I’ve been buying from ServerPartDeals are about $100 more per drive than when I bought them last year. My number was around $12/TB for those and all the shucked WD Elements drives I’d been buying in the years prior.
I’d actually caution against buying suspiciously cheap drives. There has been an epidemic of scammers selling (heavily) used drives as new.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
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There’s nowhere convenient. As you correctly identified, AI has pushed the price of drives through the roof.
Your only real chance is to find a one-off on auction sites from someone who hasn’t noticed what’s going on or what the current market is asking for drives.
You might still be able to find bargains in charity stuff or on Marketplace sites etc but these are unlikely to be sufficient capacity for NAS builds unless you get super lucky.
I have been toying with the idea of using USB storage, but my concern is that the controllers are not meant to be used that heavily. Supposedly SATA controllers are also not built for the abuse I have been throwing them in my machines, and I don’t want to push it.
Supposedly SATA controllers are also not built for the abuse I have been throwing them in my machines, and I don’t want to push it.
what makes you say that?
I bought 4x12tb Seagate refurbished for around 500€ and 2x8tb WD red pro for 300€. Note the four drives were bought 1 year ago through Amazon and the WD reds were bought in August of 2025, although the site has shut down, but they still have WD warranty. Those people on reddit either found crazy good deals or speak out their ass.
That being said make sure the drives are CRM and that the shop you buy from offers warranty and that it will be around long enough to honour it in case of defects.
Prices of HDDs have increased in recent months due to the AI bubble
Here in the NL we have a website called Tweakers for comparing hardware prices. They only really list webstores that sell to the Netherlands, but it could help give you a decent indication of normal prices at the moment.
If I sort by price / TB, this refurbished 6TB Seagate SAS-drive for €122 seems to be one of the best deals I can find:
https://www.redshell.nl/seagate-enterprise-capacity-35-hdd-interne-harde-schijf-6-tb-7200-rpm-128-mb-35-sas/Given that price, €134 for a refurbished 6TB Toshiba seems like a pretty decent deal. Though I would like to add that my experience with Toshibas is that they are quite loud compared to Seagate and Western Digital. So if noise is a concern it might be worth looking for those instead.
If you’re getting used drives I’d recommend running the array in raid z2 or raid 6 for more parity 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.
Not your scenario really but a HBA will allow you to use SATA and SAS drives. Gives a bit more flexibility on price, especially with 2nd hand SAS drives.
My drives are currently in a box supplied by wires hanging out of the PC (Server!) casing but it would look much neater with a 4 bay hot swap cage built for the purpose.
I just wish I could get the full 12 Gb/s out of the couple of SAS drives I use :o(
My idea was to run it in a mini PC, where I self host some services. I’m not sure if there are HBAs in a small form factor that would allow me to install it on the mini PC (GMKtec G10).
I’ve had good luck with Ebay. I got two 5TB enterprise drives that were SMART tested and from a trusted seller for $100. I’m in the US so YMMMV, but I’m pretty sure Ebay is global.
Also to dissuade your fears: Ebay actually has really good buyer protections now, and a good reputation system for sellers.
I haven’t bought HDDs in a while, but back in the day you could find deals on stuff like WD My Books on sale and just shuck them.
I see some WD Elements external HDDs and they seem to be cheaper than internal HDDs. I don’t know if they’re worth it, though. For example, a 5TB one is about $130.
Some other higher end selfhosters may not approve of them, but I’ll tell you that shucked WD externals are mostly what I run on my computers/servers.
Also WD Elements and WD EasyStore. They’re all the same drives inside.
AI data centers need RAM. HDDs are used for “the cloud”. 1 terabyte per user need to be stored somewhere.
1 terabyte per user need to be stored somewhere.
x 8.4+/- billion.
Yeah those refurb drives from eBay were the last good source. I got a bunch of them last year, 2 of them had issues but were replaced under warranty by the manufacturer. All of those seem to be either gone or not priced very well.
Doing anything PC related these days is very rough with prices being sky high. And even if you are willing to pay, there isn’t a lot of good stuff to get. It sucks ass.
