Alright price for a 16TB external drive considering the current exchange rate.
CamelCamelCamel.
Probably a 16TB one
Wonder which type:
Seagate Exos
Seagate IronWolf
Seagate IronWolf Pro
Seagate SkyHawk
Seagate Archives.
Bet it's only 14.6TB
I bet they count using hexadecimal.
I'll let you know when mine arrives
After I upgraded from 1080P Linux Distros to 4K HDR Linux Distros, the space requirements have doubled. I was hoping in 2025 we would now have 100TB hard drives for $400.
I was hoping for 16TB at under $200
Wait until you see how much space VR Linux Distros take.
:-D
Backup tapes would probably get you close, for the media-per-TB-per-dollar. But not really practical for a home Plex server :D
I always wanted to have one of those giant REEL-to-REEL machines from the 50-60's spinning away reading and writing my data.
I've been able to save (comparably) a lot of space in the move to 4K Linux distros with H256/HEVC file format when available.
I'd advise getting some practice in your practical tape backup methodology on an older cheaper drive before you commit to the large capital expense of a recent generation LTO tape drive, as a single recent drive unit can be kilobux.
i.e. Consider a used LTO4 drive, ~5 tapes, and a cleaning cart along with a HBA off ebay as a practice and experimentation set.
Then get good with tar, dd, LTFS, bareos/bacula and/or whatever other tape-related system you would be using before you buy the AUD$2000.00+ of kit.
I've found the Alma 8 Linux distro to be okay for tape since it's still got the libicu.50 package certain vendor-specific branches of LTFS demand as well as ELRepo having packages for the older 2xxx and SAS3xxx series LSI HBA drivers (as kmod - pluggable kernel modules) (kmod-mpt3sas); whereas Fedora dropped support for required packages to build HPE LTFS in version 40.
On Alma at least it comes down to just installing the vendor-supplied package ala sudo rpm --localinstal HPE-SOS.rpm (After installing dependancies as listed in the readme)
Likewise I suggest making a spreadsheet to find the breakeven point for the different models.
It's basically plotting a linear function y=mx+c
i.e. You are trying to find AUD_per_TB for different amounts of total raw storage capacity
Tape: price_to_store=cartridge_dollars_per_tb*tb_total+cost_of_drive
HDD: price_to_store=hdd_dollars_per_tb*tb_total+0
Until you're using that breakeven point worth of raw backup capacity it doesn't make financial sense to use tape.
TL;DR: HDDs are a lot easier to manage.
this is probably trustworthy to be a new drive?
Absolutely ……. If you buy at least two.
Really depends on yourself!
Wow, not much more expensive than this one
https://www.amazon.com.au/Western-Digital-Ultrastar-7200RPM-…
I would much prefer using my own enclosure than those from WD/Seagate
The linked WD drive is a used drive.
Bought 2 x 20TB units in January. Amazon shipped them with one airbag in a box. On arrival, no surprise, both units' actuators seized. Well at least returns are free and easy…
(Also, inside were those weird not-supposed-to-exist Barracudas you can read about on r/datahoarder).
This is not a Seagate issue - it's a "buying drives of unknown origin" issue !
These kind of used drives are readily available on the market, but usually the giveaway is that they're significantly cheaper than the usual retail price, and the manufacturing date is not current. They'll show as No Warranty on the OEM's warranty check site. These are grey market drives.
If you order a new large capacity Exos from MWave (for example) they're going to send you a brand new drive, with warranty, manufactured within the last 12 months.
If someone else is selling the same Exos drive for half the price, it's a grey market drive - you don't really know where it's come from.
If I have 4TB used on my NAS, possibly growing to 8TB in the next few years, is this overkill as a 10 year investment (aproximate life of a hard drive I use to periodically back up my NAS?)? I see most external enclosures still don't use USB-C, which I assume will become more mainstream in the next few years
Not sure if you can get 8TB drives for much less. You could also mirror 2 x 16TB instad of using parity protection. Less disks mean less failures and power saving. These disks will not even be able to saturate USB 3.0 bus. I am only getting 225MB/s on the Seagate EXOS. I am guessing the disk in this enlosure is a 5400RPM disk and probably can expect around 180MB/s throughput.
Wonder what drive is inside..