I can't remember what I paid for mine but I think it was somewhere around $10 each. I bought 28 of them, 24 to fill up the chassis and 4 spares. I've never had to use the spares, all 24 drives are still at 100% health.
WD HDD Ultrastar DC HC520 HUH721212AL4205 12TB 3.5" SAS $76.89
- Thread starter jhartbarger
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I'm thinking of all the smaller PC's that don't have available PCIe slots. Personally, I wouldn't want to put a SAS card in a system that couldn't hold a 4 drive raidgroup, which includes most desktops nowadays. I picked up a Dell T320 and was able to dismantle my hacky solutions with external drive cages. The hacks were working, but I was losing sleep over inevitable data loss.
I guess part of my bias stems from SAS drives being 10k rpm back in the day as tier 1 storage, compared to 7200 and 5400 for SATA. That's probably no longer the case now that all mechanical drives have been relegated to lower tier uses.
For perspective, when I first started in the storage biz, 4GB drives were getting phased out, and I felt like a badass with a decommissioned 60GB tower NAS system in my cube filled with totally legal music and videos.
Anyways, my point being that drive technology is constantly evolving and I find myself considering how to repurpose drives after the next better build comes along. My current build is still all 3TB SAS, but I'm thinking of moving to 12TB SATA for the next build. I'm also considering eliminating RAID protection for videos and ISOs as easily replaceable data, so my critical data footprint might be relatively small.
Let eBay call you.
Create a saved search for
Intel DC S3610 800GB with a price limit you want. That's how I got the 14TB SAS drive deal that I just posted. OTOH, I missed out on the 32GB DDR4-3200 ECC registered at $40/each, because they sold out before I checked my e-mail.
Totally fair! Part of my issue is I am unfamiliar with what models are most common out there for enterprise SSDs.
This is also how you end up buying all kind of drives because they are cheap and then they stay in your closet forever because you have no use for them.
And then you buy more cases/disk shelves and end up with a few empty slots and it all starts over...
Intel, at least the generations that tend to be a good value, are relatively easy to decode: if the part starts with S it's SATA, P for PCIe (ie NVMe.) The first digit is something like the major generation, the second digit indicates the target workload / endurance: 500 is read intensive at 1 DWPD, 600 is mixed load/3DWPD, 700 is write intensive/5 DWPD. The third digit is minor generation and then the 4th digit is mostly 0, but sometimes they change it to indicate something different (eg the p4608 which is two 3.2TB p4600 devices with a PLX switch and an x8 slot.)
Drives arrived and all were dated Feb 2022, low hours and all completed a full validation test.
I was lucky to catch the deal of 32GB DDR4-2966 RDIMM for $20 each months ago. Bought 512GB ram. wish i bought another 512GB. The problem is that 64GB LRDIMM DDR4 still costs an arm and leg!
don't forget the extra $12 shipping. I added some to my cart but combined shipping is not automatic! So you have to request it from him. And who knows if he will even allow for combined shipping or not. Sucks not to know ahead of time.
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I think 2966 is fairly easy to find. 3200 (especially at larger densities) doesn't show up very often except in less-than-4-available sales.
Of course, all these searches rely on sellers having single unit pricing. I saved some money on quiet fans for my Supermicro fan walls by adding "lot" to my search.