I have a giant storage RAID for my home server, with a bunch of 16TB drives. I bought each of the drives used about three years ago, and they cost about $120 each. They have been working fine until last night.
One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.
I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.
[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.
ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.
I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the “26” sold on their listings that are now astronomically priced: https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT
Edit: They also lied on their customs declarations (!)
I have a home array too, though based on 4Tb drives (6x, two lots of RAID10, one 3x4T one 3x6T, linked as an LVM volume as I extended it by adding the second array some time ago).
I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…
I've recently bought 3x32TB (new) and 2x28TB (recertified) drives for a new NAS as my old one started running out of space on some drives (local LLMs and datasets or media for dataset preparations are huge these days) as I expect the prices to go up considerably due to most HDD manufacturers being booked years in advance already. Some drives don't even make it to retail at all (44TB Seagate).
I bought 8x 4TB NAS RED 5400RPM HDD and paid in total AUD$1.4k, I am not even joking. My pool is only 8TB mirrorer and I am keeping the other 16TB as spare because things will get worse.
I bought them brand new because used ones cannot be trusted but even that brings risks.
WD has been selling 7200RPM labelled as 5400RPM disks.
WD was selling SMR disks instead of CMR disks.
Seagate disks used into crypto farms are being sold as brand new, so folks are finding our their brand new disks have 65k hours.
Some years ago, Modi announced that he was going to make India go all-in on semiconductors. When I read that the first facility to begin commercial production was going to be Micron with memory chips, I did an eyeroll. Memory chips? And just an assembly and testing facility? To me that seemed like an easy cop-out. To me (my admittedly naive self), wafer fabs and CPUs seemed like the real game.
Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now).
Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.
69 comments
One of them appears to be broken [1]. No big deal, this is what RAIDs are for, I go and try to find one and now they're going anywhere between 2-4x that price, for a used one! It's not going to bankrupt me (and having a home server is a privilege in the first place, that's not lost on me), but I really hope that the others survive, at least until this storage crunch is over. If it ever does end...sigh.
I guess I didn't realize that even relatively slow storage like spinner drives was going to be affected too.
[1] I think, I am really hoping it's just a bad connection or something but I haven't fully diagnosed it yet.
ETA: Looks like at least in my case it was actually just a bad SATA cable. The drive is reading properly and resilvering now. Phew.
For example this seller: https://www.ebay.com/str/disctechllc
“Accidentally miss-priced” a bunch of drives, and then instead of canceling the orders, refunded everyone, but still shipped packages: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/enterprise...
I believe they intentionally did this, causing people huge import fees in some cases, in order to not remove the “26” sold on their listings that are now astronomically priced: https://ebay.us/m/mGRdiT
Edit: They also lied on their customs declarations (!)
I was planning to downsize anyway as most of the media I don't need to keep and I plan to replace that server with a much lower power one with a bunch of smaller SSDs. Luckily I bought the SSDs (and the other parts) before the recent price hikes, I just haven't got around to building the machine! Hopefully they all work when I do finally get around to it…
It's odd mechanical disks also surged, I thought it was only transistor based memory that are becoming rarity.
Or does it work like with fuel, gas and electricity goes up when oil spikes ?
I bought 8x 4TB NAS RED 5400RPM HDD and paid in total AUD$1.4k, I am not even joking. My pool is only 8TB mirrorer and I am keeping the other 16TB as spare because things will get worse.
I bought them brand new because used ones cannot be trusted but even that brings risks.
WD has been selling 7200RPM labelled as 5400RPM disks.
WD was selling SMR disks instead of CMR disks.
Seagate disks used into crypto farms are being sold as brand new, so folks are finding our their brand new disks have 65k hours.
Now, with what has happened with memory chip prices, it almost seems like they got lucky (the Micron facility is doing commercial shipments now).
Obama used to talk about having "spooky" good luck. I think Modi has some of that too.
We are trully doomed.