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?

  • tiramichu@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    5 hours ago

    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.