Hi, I seek your help once again. I’m in the need of upgrading my storage now and I found what I consider to be a good deal via Amazon on an older gen enterprise WD drive that supposedly hasn’t been used, but I’ll let the power on hours tell me the truth. The price is about 16usd/TB and I’m wondering if this is a bad idea due to the age of the drive? I’m guessing the drive would be about 10 years old maybe. The plan would be to buy 2: 1 for my cold media backups and the other would be a backup for the cold media backup.
not sure on location or budget or if you have a brand preference (I know some people only buy WD, some only seagate, others just want name brand, and some don’t give a shit at all). If you are going for medium-sized drives, especially used ones it could be ok. But IMO, that isn’t a great price if you are considering larger drives. For smaller sized drives, they are usually cheaper but there’s larger percent markup so your price per TB usually increases. For used drives, I would definitely expect it to go down a good bit though.
Currently, I can get a new 8TB seagate drive off Amazon in the US for $110 (which comes out to $13.75 per TB). Normally, that drive is listed for $137 ($17.13 per TB).
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-Drive-3-5-Inch/dp/B07H289S7C
obviously, if you need 2 drives, shelling out $220 might be a decent chunk of change depending on income
If you have the time, best bet is to plug in a few drives within your budget at https://camelcamelcamel.com/ and wait it out.