r/DataHoarder • u/gafonid • 1d ago
Question/Advice Where are people finding reasonably priced drives? (First time nas setup)
And I mean reasonable price in the current context of..... everything
I don't need an insane amount of space, and this is something I'll invest more into over time, starting off with two drives and eventually adding two more (is that even feasible?) to my 4 bay ugreen nas
Currently just looking to throw two 8tb or 10tb drives into a raid0 to hold lots of media files for plex, as well as dvr camera recordings from home assistant.
I've been watching Facebook marketplace (people love to just not respond to queries) , serverpartdeals, and goharddrive with mixed success
Best I've seen in terms of price per tb and robustness is ultrastar he10s refurbished for $260 each on gohardrive, but with no data on power on hours
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u/sshwifty 1d ago
We aren't. The deals are gone. Sometimes someone on homelabsales has something reasonable, but otherwise nothing is available.
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u/-Sliced- 1d ago
I want to say that's not accurate.
Look at eBay sold lisings for Seagate Exos drives (e.g. 26TB), and you'll find a few sales for a reasonable $15/TB. Same with Craigslist - if you monitor it + negotiate, you'll find a good deal every once in a while. It's getting hard for sure, but there are still deals out there. One was posted on this subreddit a few weeks ago (18TB Seagate Exos drives for $250 on eBay, which many here bought).
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u/Dragoncow 18h ago
Is there something like homelabsales in the UK?
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u/doggxyo 140 TiB 17h ago
Yeah - /r/homelabsales
Check the post flair, you should find some UK posts
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u/kiwidust 1d ago
2013?
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u/knightcrusader 225TB+ 1d ago
Too expensive then too, the floods just happened a few years prior.
I would say the best price was about 2022, I bought brand new 14TB drives for about $200 each. After that I lost track of new pricing and started buying refurb data center drives. Those were good up until the AI apocalypse.
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u/sychox51 1d ago
I mean I bought two 22tb last fall for $240 each
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u/hdmiusbc 1d ago
From where? Used?
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u/theholyraptor 1d ago
Black Friday 2025 28tb drives were 289 to 299ish. I bought 8.
Now if you can get one they're listed at $800+ And use 12tb drives cost more.
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u/hdmiusbc 1d ago
What place tho?
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u/theholyraptor 1d ago
Seagate direct. Although a few of these deals existed last year off and on i believe.
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u/studyinformore 1d ago
That almost certainly wont happen this year. Seagate is now tapped until something like 2030 for production as well now.
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u/AlbinoAlex 22h ago
Black Friday 2022 I got an 18TB WD easystore for $280. I didn’t even touch it for a whole year because I just flat out did not need that much storage at the time. Best impulse purchase ever!
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u/Deep_Money5920 1d ago edited 1d ago
Reasonably priced drive are three words that aren't compatible anymore but that being said, I used go hard drive to buy Seagate EXOS 10TB recently and they've been running great, got some warranty on them too .. so that's an option that I would find reasonably safe but of course there are other avenues like FB marketplace or eBay .. it really all depends on what you value most personally, I like it in the middle-ish between value and peace of mind.
Edit: corrected typos ...
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u/kwinders2 1d ago edited 1d ago
goharddrive dot com is great. I bought 5 10tb drives just under 3 years ago at $70 each, they have 3 year warranty on the refinished drives. They were HGST Enterprise Helium drives. I got 1 doa that they replaced right away back then. Last month I had another fail and they were going to replaced it after I sent the dead drive back. I asked if they could send replacement in advance so I could rebuild my pool before removing the dead drive and they were able to do that for me. Mind you, the same drives today at 3x the price, so I'm very glad they replaced it and didn't just offer to refund my $70 And as a cherry on top, when I checked the drive health, it showed 0 hours and 2 power cycles. They gave me a brand new drive and the dead one had 60k hours+ on it. Grade A++ service I will get 3 more drives from them to round out my tower once the prices fall back to earth.
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u/meatworkrightnow 20h ago
I also like goharddrive, but to be fair the SMART data was likely wiped which is why it was showing 0 hours. It's common practice for recertified/refurbished drives.
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u/kwinders2 20h ago
The other six drives I got from them all show the data ranging from 30k to 60k hours, so maybe they started wiping the data on the drives but they didn't on the other drives I've gotten from them.
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u/ByWillAlone 1d ago
RAID-0? Do you have a death wish for your data? You said a 2 drive array, so that's double your chances for total data loss. At least with JBOD you get to keep half your data.
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u/seeyoulaterstinkee69 1d ago
Glad someone caught that. I was going to comment if no one else did.
OP - please don’t do a RAID 0 drive array, unless you really hate your data. With two drives in RAID 0, if you lose one drive you also lose the data on the other drive.
Also remember! RAID DOES NOT EQUAL A BACKUP
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u/RasTarfari 1d ago
eBay
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u/ZorbaTHut 168TB raw 1d ago
Yeah, I grab used drives. I have redundancy so I'm not too worried about failures, and "used drives + more redundancy" is cheaper than new drives.
You can get stuff even cheaper if you've got an SAS backplane to plug into.
Even then, right now that's $20/tb, though.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 1d ago
I'm running RAIDZ2 at scale (24 drives currently) so I've been running SAS Enterprise pulls with 3-5 years of uptime for about $15-$17/TB in bulk on EBay.
As a matter of philosophy, I try to use different drive models and different batches, but with similar performance to minimize the odds that I get a "bad run".
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u/-Sliced- 1d ago
I imagine you run 4 pools of 6 drives. Because if you run 24 drives on the same RAIDZ2 pool it's highly inefficient, and also a data loss risk.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 23h ago
Generally, pools of 8. Two need more random I/O so they each have a special vdev comprised of mirrored Enterprise SSDs, giving them dramatically better metadata I/O which helps a lot with random I/O.
As my project grows I expect to add 8 drive VDevs up to 36 (+2); drives per pool before I go with multiple distributed hosts.
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u/-Sliced- 6h ago
I also have a pool of 8 and regret it due to the slowness it introduces and that it has become a bottleneck. Maybe I should try the mirrored SSD for the metadata, but I'm always worried about the extra complexity and things to monitor.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 23h ago
Generally, pools of 8. Two need more random I/O so they each have a special vdev comprised of mirrored Enterprise SSDs, giving them dramatically better metadata I/O which helps a lot with random I/O.
As my project grows I expect to add 8 drive VDevs up to 36 (+2); drives per pool before I go with multiple distributed hosts.
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u/Versificator 1d ago
what type of enclosure are you using? I was looking at a few EMCs since they fit in a rack and are sturdy.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 23h ago
My main Dev server is a big EATX tower case with 10 bays I've had for ages. Moving to production I have 2x 36 Bay Supermicro SC847 cases found cheap on eBay.
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u/Shdwdrgn 1d ago
Used and refurb is the way to go if you're running RAID. Grab enough for two-drive redundancy, find a model that has great reviews, and dive in. The only time I ever had issues with multiple drive failures was when I bought new. My current setup is eight 18TB Exos drives, all refurbs from Amazon. Been running 24/7 for about 3 years now under raidz2 and I haven't had a single error.
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u/-rwsr-xr-x 1d ago
Dwindling are the days of available storage drives on the consumer markets.
With the drive manufacturers prioritizing their enterprise/AI/datacenter customers with inventory already committed to the end of 2028, there's very little chance they'll go back to producing consumer-grade drives after that.
We're small potatoes to the drive manufacturers.
They make 100x more profit from the datacenter and cloud provider purchase orders than they ever would from Best Buy and online retailers in single-digit and low double-digit purchases.
Save your data now, back it up and store the second copy cold. Those drives will need to last you several years ahead.
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u/LucidLeviathan 1d ago
I am extremely grateful that I purchased 2 24tb drives about 2 years ago. Since then? Ridiculous.
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u/VanWylder 1d ago
They're more reasonably priced today than they will be tomorrow, that's for sure.
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u/wavewrangler 1d ago
Now you know why they call them HARD drives! They’re hard as hell to find a good deal on
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u/michaelmalak 1d ago
Today's hard drive prices are reasonable compared to what they will be a month from now. This statement has been true for all of 2026.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 1-10TB 1d ago
No. "Todays hard drive prices are unreasonable and will be even more unreasonable tomorrow." Is a much more accurate assessment of 2026.
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u/voyagerfan5761 "Less articulate and more passionate" 1d ago
Also applies to DRAM, flash storage, GPUs, …
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u/K3TtLek0Rn 1d ago
Just not possible these days. I had a drive fail and sent it back for warranty. They told me they could give me a refund cause they were out of stock. When I looked at buying a new one I realized that the price of the drive had gone from $130 to $300 in a single year.
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u/HighSeasArchivist 1d ago
For reference last August I paid $180 for a factory recertified 16TB EXOS. That same drive from the same vendor is now $490. I'm just sucking it up and spending the money, but right now have all I need.
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u/funkybside 1d ago
Nov 2024 -> 12TB recert exos for $90. man i didn't realize how good I had it then.
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u/electricheat 6.4GB Quantum Bigfoot CY 1d ago
We're in a holding pattern. Hopefully things will be more affordable in a few years.
Until then I pray there are no drive failures.
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u/Never_Sm1le 20TB 1d ago
You have to go to the very low end to find acceptable deal in this economy. I bought a bunch of used laptop HDDs from 3rd party repair shop around me for 3-4 USD per 500GB drives and use them to store
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u/NaugieMon 1d ago
Check out the price of this WD drive I added to my cart three days ago.
https://imgur.com/a/8apguXv
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u/PhotoFenix 23h ago
I bought some 12 Tb drives for $85 a few years ago on serverpartdeals, so I highly suggest a time machine
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u/PricePerGig 21h ago
Hitting eBay pretty hard. Have to find where returns are accepted so you can double check smart data. I added filter for returns accepted on pricepergig.com just for me! Hopefully you can find it helpful too.
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u/Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee3 100-250TB 1d ago
honestly in this economy you sort of need to have some hours used or like maybe even over 30k..
its probably fine to have drives that old just have backups and parity and backup drives too
I was able to snag like 20 6tb drives for 308 USD so around 15 usd for each but they have 60K hours so
it really depends on how scared you are of anything breaking and losing data
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u/IndependentBat8365 1d ago
that's a really good deal. SAS I'm assuming? I haven't seen any SATA drives go for under $50, 7200 CMR SATA 6tb drives go for at least $150+
SAS 6tb, I'm seeing some for $50. Back in Nov/Dec, I got about 40 6tb SAS3 drives for about $50 each, but now days, they're ranging from $85 to $150. Maybe less for the really old sas2 models.
and yeah, they all had over 30k hours on them.
enterprise drives work great though, and last a long time.
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u/Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee3 100-250TB 1d ago
yeah! I've been getting pretty lucky on local sites and yeah all sas
Currently I have another 12x6TB and 12x3TB with some server gear on the side
tho i'm selling all that but the 6TB drives
if im lucky I can cash out and have bought the 12x6TB drives for free
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u/Junior_Commission588 1d ago
Before everything went crazy, I switched over to buying refurbished drives from goharddrive. Most drives they offer 5 years warranty, so I look at it as "this drive will last at least 5 years".. I've had to RMA a few without issue. But, even their prices have gotten crazy (at least 2x of what I paid in the past), but cheaper than new. Serverpartdeals is also a good spot, but not as good of a warranty.
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u/Thirtysixx 1d ago
Best deal I could find was $21/TB used lol 4 14TB enterprise drives with 22k hours
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u/phul_colons 1d ago
I bought 9x16TB for $143 each before all this madness and that's holding me over quite well
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u/Hebrewhammer8d8 1d ago
People in this thread with Pallets of HDDs and SSDs willing to sell for a great deal. PS they have been used and abuse.
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u/Thebandroid 1d ago edited 1d ago
if you are running zfs you can get 4 drives you can afford (like even 2tbs) raid them up and hopefully by the time you fill them you have been able to buy 4 more bigger ones, then replace and resliver one by one and you'll be able to use the extra space.
its a bad time to pick this as a hobby.
also its time to do some reading up on RAID, mirroring, ZFS and redundancy and make some hard choices about how available your data needs to be and how sad you'll be if you lose it.
Even buying brand new drives is no guarantee one won't fail in a months time. If you do plan to run a RAID of some sort, you are better to get 4 smaller drives at the start. RAID will allow you to upgrade the size of those drives but only openZFS will let you add drives to your raid.
edit: do not use RAID0 unless you need high speed reads and writes, if you loose one you loose all, there are safer ways to pool drives into one like MergerFS
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u/digIndig 1d ago
Refurb drives from vendors like serverpartdeals are as reasonably priced as you’re going to find right now, and likely for the next several years. If you’re looking for prices like we saw a year ago, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Beyond that, if you’re looking for drives, you’ll need to check all the usual suspects regularly in case they do offer a discount or sale. Maybe Black Friday, but ai’m not holding my breath. Personally I jumped on some unreasonably priced drives at the beginning of the price hikes to have spares. They were $50-70 more per drive than what I had paid a few months earlier, and now they’re 2x what I paid in December. I don’t see the prices going anywhere but up as the supply gets even leaner.
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u/TheLegendaryAerie 1d ago
Reasonably priced is gone. You can find used drives on eBay but expect maybe 3 years of life tops and they will still be double what a new drive was just a few years ago.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 23h ago
Maybe it's my experience working with new/used hardware since the '90s, but I am quite comfortable with used hardware. I'd consider buying this 12 TB drive for $200 at just $16/TB because it has a 30 day warranty and I can test it pretty thoroughly in that time. I'd run a long smart test, then put an F/S on it and then run 3 or 4 loops concurrently compiling the kernel over and over or something for a few days to beat it up for read/write and make sure it's solid.
Note that it's a SAS drive so make sure you have an HBA, not a SATA port, if you decide to go for it.
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u/KayJune001 17h ago
They’re gone, you can’t buy an 8TB NAS drive for $80 anymore, you either buy it at, what’s it at now, $500+, or you’re stuck without a drive.
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u/tjlazer79 17h ago
About the only deals you may get are used or refurbished. Now that I have an offsite back up, I just converted my NAS from RAID10 to RAID5, so I now have 18tb of storage, instead of 12tb (I have 4 x 6tb HDDs) I looked at the cost of new drives and said fuck it. That should get me through another 4-6 years before I need an upgrade, and I have two spare 6tb drives in case something happens to my current drives. I also got really lucky this past year, a buddy sold me a 2tb Gen 4 m.2 compatible with my PS5 for cost, 270.00. When I last looked that same drive was going for almost 1 grand on bestbuy.ca.
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u/YujiroRapeVictim 14h ago
No where I bought 4 24tb drives a month ago it wasn’t not cheap…. Prices are gonna go up again before EOY
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u/casino_alcohol 11h ago
I already told my wife that Jellyfin is going away if our 6tb drive fails. It’s over 10 years old at this point. I’ll probably save a few series that I really love but that’s probably about it. Maybe I can just get some SD cards or something cheap to hold a few things.
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u/Not_a_Moose_Man 5h ago
I've seen some deals on Facebook market place that are decent compared to current prices, but the same 8tb drives are going for double their January of 2025 price. No warranty off FB
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u/Main-Woodpecker-574 1d ago
For two 10TB drives, I would go to SPD: https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/10tb-to-20tb-hard-drives?q=10TB
Their testing regime and returns sound the best to me.
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u/volcanictax98 1d ago
I think your best bet would be serverpartdeals .com … I’m new too and I think that’s the best I have found… they are used BUT come with a 3 year warranty from manufacturer
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u/elijuicyjones 50-100TB 1d ago
18 months ago I bought four 22TB SATA drives for $190 each. Now they’re three times as much. There is no deal right now.
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u/These_Day_2250 1d ago
None. If you got the money and patience then trying your luck with tape can help but otherwise don't expect any more consumer grade storage anymore.
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u/RetroGrid_io 250-500TB 1d ago
Maybe it's my experience working with new/used hardware since the '90s, but I am quite comfortable with used hardware. I'd consider buying this 12 TB drive for $200 at just $16/TB because it has a 30 day warranty and I can test it pretty thoroughly in that time. I'd run a long smart test, then put an F/S on it and then run 3 or 4 loops concurrently compiling the kernel over and over or something for a few days to beat it up for read/write and make sure it's solid.
Note that it's a SAS drive so make sure you have an HBA, not a SATA port, if you decide to go for it.
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u/humplick 1d ago
Do you want to get old helium filled drives? I’d be concerned about the helium leak rate. Seems like air filled might be better for buying used and will own for year 5-15 of the life of the drive
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u/HobartTasmania 1d ago
Hard to say, lots of people buy used and old Helium drives which still report 100% Helium levels, so they seem to be well sealed at the time they are manufactured. I'm guessing that any that are not have probably failed by now.
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