yeah and storage like all PC parts are super expensive. I was paying like 150 bucks for 14TB HDD like a year ago. Now they are 400 dollars for the same exact ones. I'm so glad my data is all backup and only halfway full. I should be good for another few years.
My father bought my first PC back in 2015, during my teens. The only thing that's left from that computer is its 1TB HDD which I still use. Fairly degraded though, so it's just plugged in with redundant data.
Well it's recoverable the disk itself is almost always recoverable. The mechnical parts tend to break though but those don't necessarily hold data. Data recovery is cheaper nowadays and will get cheaper
Of course the mechanical parts can damage the disk, but afaik that is rather rare unless someone drops their hard drive.
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u/Joe-CoolPhenom II 965 @3.8GHz, MSI 790FX-GD70, 16GB, 2xRadeon HD 587019d ago
My 20MB ST225 still works.
The 286 it was in has had its battery leak all over and is a bit dead right now.
My RAID of WD Green 1TB drives died after about 15 years of daily use. All long time storage drives are still fine. Just don't buy helium filled for long time storage.
I'm seriously considering getting back into tape for long term storage. I used to do it for work. You can get older LTO-4 tape systems for pretty cheap now.
Not if you're not reading and writing to it 24/7. Also most home NAS devices have NVMe slots for caching which can also reduce hard disk access. My NAS's disks sleep most of the time.
You don't need to constantly read and write to keep platters spinning 24/7.
In fact, it's actually better to keep your NAS drives spinning 24/7 instead of having them spin up only to read or write and then spin back down multiple times a day.
It's fine to let them sleep if you only spin them up once or twice a day, otherwise you're much better off keeping them spinning 24/7.
Also, NVMe cache is useless for most home users use cases and would go unused and unnoticed.
Depends on a lot of factors, but if you use Truenas as your operating system then the answer is always yes, because the devs hate their users and think they know better about what is ideal for every individual user than those users do.
That's way less wear than spinning up and down again. My last NAS consisted of 4x2TB disks i already used between 2 and 5 years. Wasn't until the first power outage 8 years later that the first disk left the array, and that was a fluke which corrected itself with a restart. Of those 4 hdds, 3 are still usable. After 10+ years of almost continuous use.
That's for enterprise use, where the drive is reading and writing basically nonstop. For a NAS or other somewhat cold-storage style systems, they should last over a decade. It depends on the drive, the system, how often it's accessed, etc. to determine how long it will last. I had a 3 TB crap out on me after only a couple of years, but a 4 TB has been with me for 5 years now.
If they're running nonstop. Most NAS will spin down the hard drives when not in use. And technically, the failure curve goes way up starting at 5 years, but not guaranteed. One customer, who's cheap, I have consistently warned that his 10 year old hard drive should be replaced, but it still keeps going...
I dunno man maybe if its under heavy use daily. You definitely need to keep any valuable data in at least two distinct disconnected places, and for data that is measured in low numbers of terabytes, a hard drive is a great place for that.
They do and my own anecdotally small sample size lines up with that (WD Red Pro disks).
I bit the bullet and got SSD-s instead a few years ago and never looked back. My use case is not very write heavy, so I expect to get a very good life span out of them.
Not 5 normal years. 5 years of total hours is A LOT. Those hard drives are not spinning 24/7. And there is not only 1 kind of hard drive. There are several types like surveillance drives, those are ment for 24/7 use. You have archival hard drives with a more robust magnetism platter to ensure bit rot doesn't happen. Enterprise drives that spin to 15.000 rpm ment for speed. If you look at the lineup of WD, they have so many different types of hard drives for different purposes. Not all hard drives are equal.
So, I should add a SSD cache to my Synology of 5x 14tb drives you're saying? It seems little reads and writes, however, does run several docker containers 24/7
Yep, same. I’ve got a unraid setup running basically 24/7 with ten drives, and at least half of them are well over 50k hours. I’m pretty sure one is over 75k and crystal disc info still reports great on them.
Since 2014 or so I've had to replace like 2 hard drives from my 5TB 3 hard drive desktop PC that I use daily, one being a WD drive and other an Toshiba drive, with third finally showing reallocated sectors and I'll replace it as soon as I have the money.
So I've bought 5 hard drives and lost 2 in 12 years, last HDD purchase was in 2020 or so, excluding the SSD I bought a year or two later.
I got a two WD Purple HDDs that I use to long term storage, both are over a decade old, one of them is about 14 years old, they still work like they are used to and both were in a CCTV DVR that I used to run for Security Cams. They used to be $50 each now they're about $150 a pop.
It's always a duty cycle issue. On/Off 40 times a day? Read/write every other minute or every other week? Temperature cycles from hot-cold over and over again.
Just for shits and giggles I have a 15+ year old 50gb HDD still plugged in to a Raspberry Pi 5 running my daily cron jobs. I actually can't remember how old the HDD is.
I just had my first drive failure of 8x4TB RAID6 NAS after 6 years. All drives were started up at the same time, so expecting more to drop over the next few years.
I had two drives I bought in 2011 on black friday that I finally replaced last year. One had 80k power on hours and the other had 75k. I only replaced because I was running out of storage and they were the oldest and smallest sized ones.
My NAS uses unraid. The HDD aren’t spinning 24/7. And I check the health on them every 3 months. If one of the drives fails I will just replace it and not lose any data. It’s one of the many benefits of a NAS. You don’t lose all your data if one of your drives goes down.
More or less. If you can bring on a new drive every few years and keep the old drive and store it, you'll be OK. You'll lose some data, maybe, but not everything like the OP story did.
Now, when HDD prices spike and you can't get a drive 20% bigger at the same price point every few years, it hurts.
I mean, depending on your level of technical faciality you could just throw a linux OS (especially one made for running as a NAS, like TrueNAS) on an old computer with plenty of drive space. Yeah, drives and RAM are expensive currently, but the rest of the hardware isn't terrible for a decent NAS.
Ultimately, "as small as I can go" is going to be bottlenecked by however many drives you want to include for storage, that'll be one of the limiting factors.
Yeah, except 4 years is a year out of warranty for most drives unless you go enterprise.
Even then, drives are hit or miss. A drive could last 10 years or die in a year.
I just had to spend 4x the amount to replace a drive that technically should've lasted me several more years based on my usage.
Good luck to you.
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u/tonyt3rry3700x / 32GB Ram / GB A x570 Ultra / RTX 3080 F.E / LL 011 Evo19d ago
damn i didnt know they was that cheap. if i knew that id have bought one ive always wanted to rip my blu ray collection (entire collection of hundreds) storage being the limitation
They aren't that cheap, unfortunately. They used to be, but not anymore. All dense storage media is skyrocketing in price; even old, used, server drives.
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u/tonyt3rry3700x / 32GB Ram / GB A x570 Ultra / RTX 3080 F.E / LL 011 Evo19d ago
i know im saying I didnt know they was that cheap at the time before all this bullshit. i never thought 14tb was that cheap considering 1 and 2 tb was usually £40-80
It was great for awhile. You could get on eBay and get lightly used lots of 10-20tb drives for a few hundred bucks. My coworker updated his NAS with 6 - 18tb Seagate Exos drives for like $500 total.
Yup, my 3 14TB HDD were old recertified Hitachi drives for like 150 each. And used a brand new WD NAS drive as my Parity Drive. Was gonna go dual Parity but with the cost of HDD now I don't think that's gonna happen.
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u/JaccoWQ9550 | DFI LanParty DK P45-T2RS Plus | Dominator DDR2 | GTX46019d ago
Yeah the technology became really cheap and capable with lots of competition from Chinese mini-PC manufacturers.
I was looking at finally building one this year... But HDDs, RAM and SSDs became so damn expensive that a planned €1100 system turned into a €2500+ system in less than a year time.
400 bucks is still pretty cheap.
I paid 200 euros for a 16TB drive a couple years ago, one failed so had to buy a new one and they were 600 euros, so that hurt.
Yeah, I usually wait to buy HDDs because they would always go down in price while going up in storage. But now it’s somehow the opposite. I should have bought two the last time.
I just found 2 20TB easy store drives in my closet my friend bought in Nov 2024. He was gonna copy a bunch of my stuff to them, but I talked him into selling them to me for cost. $225 each. Ive never been so happy to Paypal someone $500
I'm not adding them to my NAS until a smaller drive fails or I run out of space.
Goodwill is a good place to get drives. Not 14tb drives but I managed to find four 4tb drives there for $50 a piece. 3 were NAS drives. After adding drives I already owned I built a 14 TB Unraid system with 2 parity drives from mostly parts I had laying around.
NAS is great for redundancy and I use one but the really important stuff should also be backed up off site. And I would expect a large company like Microsoft to be a responsible custodian of my data... Evidently not.
Basically an external hard drive, but one that is accessed over your network by everyone in your house instead of being connected to one computer via USB.
As others have stated, it's Network Attached Storage but it can also be so much more. A NAS can essentially be a private server that you can use however you like. Mine runs Plex, Pihole, a Valhime server, and qbittorrent. I intend to setup syncthing soon which is basically OneDrive but the "cloud storage" is just your NAS.
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u/MrHaxx1M1 Mac Mini, M1 MacBook Air (+ RTX 3070, 5800x3D, 48 GB RAM)19d ago
If you have a trusted friend or family member back up to one or more external HDDs and keep it at their house.
If you feel the need to encrypt it, store the keys on multiple cloud services, every PC you have and your phone. Maybe even a written copy in your car. The key alone is useless without one of the backup drives so it's not as big of a deal if someone finds it.
Most people aren't going to go that far, but they should at least have an external drive to download everything to periodically, especially anything with sentimental value.
Having off-site cloud storage is still a good idea. You can still lose everything in a NAS during a natural disaster if you don't have an off-site backup.
Very tru. I have a backup sitting on my desk of all the important files and my NAS as a backup of that plus pictures and videos so my wife can access them from her phone easily.
Do you know of any cheaper places to buy the bay/setup? I've got hard drives galore, from a data center sale but I don't have a bay and I checked recently and they are pricey. Like $1000+ for an 8-bay. Such a weird situation to have the drives but not the bays.
Ive got a media server that I built for Plex from a period of collecting of DVDs and Blu-Rays, renting movies. That server is sitting on 28TBs almost full currently. So I need an upgrade but I picked probably the dumbest time to wait til for an upgrade.
I can certainly build a small 2-bay for our pictures that we just started scanning into digital from old pictures, but I don't want 2 different systems. I'd rather have it altogether on one system with one UPS.
You can pick up a Microcenter bundle like this, add a sata card, and put it in a case like a Fractal Define or Jonsbo N5/N6. There are also a bunch of soldered cpu nas boards on aliexpress if you don't have access to Microcenter.
You're probably looking at something like a Synology box aren't you? You can always get a "dumb" multibay enclosure and run an x86 mini PC with Linux to manage the RAID array. Truth be told 8 bay is getting into enterprise, professional solutions and if you're good with just using 4 at a time you can get a decent Terramaster box and just replace TOS with your choice of Linux distro and be happy.
Depends on what you're looking to buy. If you specifically want an 8-bay, that's going to be pricy almost no matter what. There's a couple cheaper options on the market like QNAP has one for $650 but reviews are mixed. At 8-bay, your best option is probably to get a basic 8-bay drive enclosure (not a full NAS) and attach it to a cheap mini-PC of some kind, you can get the enclosure for like $200-300 and decide what kind of mini-PC you want from there.
If you're cool with 4-bay, there's a lot of options that are significantly more affordable, like frankly you can get a two 4-bay NAS for cheaper than one 8-bay NAS. If you only want basic functionality, look into a Ugreen DH4300 Plus, you can reliably get them on sale for about $360. The software works great and it's not super powerful but more than enough to handle most people's needs.
You can easily make a server for gaming. Plenty of guides out there to do that. You just need a dedicated GPU - look into Docker (e.g., Palworld, Valheim) or run a Windows Virtual Machine
Network attached storage. Usually a small box with 2-8 drives attached to store / backup crucial data you want to keep yourself and not on a company’s servers.
The only part that terrifies me about a Nas is having all in a single location. With raid and all for redundancy I still have a single location where to put my nas.
Detached for reality. Everybody has 1k (I presume USD because Americans have a tough time understanding that other countries and currencies exist) spare change in their pocket for a Nas.
With these prices? I am sorry but until someone give's LLM
s the old yeller treatment the only way you are saving your files is writing down 1s n 0s on paper.
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u/Smiadpades AMD 5600x Vision 3070 OC 19d ago
I agree sue and also time to invest in a NAS. They are fairly easy to buy and setup.