Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Need guidance, storage purchase imminent, limited budget. Recert / Refurb Drives (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I need to reach a certain amount of space but have a limited budget. I saw these refurb drives on bargainhardware a while back and waited through BF to see if anything close to the £/TB came up. Unfortunately the UK doesn't seem to have seen any such deals.

My budget is limited, I also already have some older smaller drives that would form part of the array. I would likely be using unRAID with 2 of the purchased drives being Parity drives, or the same with SnapRAID. I feel that 2x Parity is neccessary to ensure that I can protect against inevitable failure, my current 4TB drives approach 5 years in use, and the refurb drives are between 3 and 5 years old according to the seller (datacentre use). If you feel you can suggest better alternatives or new drives that fit the bill please let me know. I feel that I would be unlikely to return a storage drive under warranty.

4x 10TB HGST HUH721010ALN600 £86.40 - £345.60. 20TB pool, approx 5 years usage.
3x 12TB WD HC520 HUH721212ALE601 £132 - £396. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), approx 3 years usage.
3x 12TB EMC Seagate ST12000NM005G £120 - £360. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), unknown time in use, Seagate?

I don't want to go above £400, I have a need for at least 10TB in the pool and in my mind 2 Parity drives is mitigating some of the risk with refurb drives. Am I going about this the wrong way?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You need at least like 5-6 drives for double parity to be economical. Aside from that you need backup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you - I have 4 other 4TB drives that would make up the pool and several 2TB drives. I would estimate this to be a pool size starting at 5+ drives and rising, so I wanted to get the parity in place now. But this makes sense, I am considering how to approach a 1 parity situaiton.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Note that any sane RAID software will limit the size used on each drive to the size of the smallest drive in the array.