Hey, I recently saw a comment on where to buy server hardware (mainly hard drives) sadly I forgot about the URL and didn’t save it. What are you guys favourite places to buy these kind of things? :D
EDIT: I should’ve said for the EU would be heavily preferable since I live in Germany, sorry for the confusion :/
It was probably me. I use these two places + eBay primarily but I’m sure there are other good ones out there.
https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/hard-drives
https://diskprices.com
Edit: also for posterity this is a cool site but shucking drives hasn’t been viable for a long time as far as I’ve seen: https://shucks.top/
Diskprices can be a little wacky sometimes. There are clearly people who are gaming the system. You’ll see something crazy on there, and you click the link and it’s nowhere near what it says.
I always just do drives sorted by best TB/$ value and then skip any company I haven’t heard of and go with the cheapest name brand. Hasn’t failed me yet. Got many drives going on more than a decade of service now.
Yeah I think I remember thank you 😅 I just noticed are these also valid options for Germany or should I go with my usual places to hard drives of? Anyway thank you for your comment :)
I’m not sure what’s around for Germany, sorry. You may be able to use eBay to find local sellers cross-posting from their normal website?
That’s a good idea. When I’m gonna look should I scout for new ones or can I look for already used once? Also how many should I buy 2 for a raid 1 or 3 or something to use a raid 5/10
I prefer recertified ones if they’re significantly cheaper, but that’s up to you. Recertified will likely fail faster but when they’re close to ~60% of the cost it makes sense to gamble.
As for which RAID that is up to you and how you’re setting up your array. If you’re running ZFS then mirrored pairs are somewhat flexible since you can add a pair whenever you want of any size disks, but they will cost you 50% of your disk space in redundancy. For RAID5/6 you want the disk sizes to match and for ZFS you won’t be able to add any disks to a RAID5/6 array for about a year - the code that adds that feature is coming in the next release which will take about a year.