How much for 5TB?

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
12/17/2016 at 22:47 • Filed to: None

A few months back I purchased a 5TB over at Target for $139, a fair price for the capacity at the time. But in the last couple of months I’ve purchased another 5TB of storage, this time for about $136 less. Mind you, it’s not all on one disc like the original purchase, but the price simply cannot be beat.

Here’s the trick. You’ve probably heard me mention the Goodwill Outlet store near my office. They’ve been having a sale on electronic and electric items for $0.59, for the most part, unless the manager intervenes. Slight tangent - today I tried to buy a wonky 39" LED TV for $0.59, but they insisted on charging me $10 for it; I should be able to get it running right with a replacement circuit board for $28 (there really isn’t much inside of a modern TV). Anyway, back to the hard drives. Last night I picked up yet another DirecTV HR34 HD DVR, again at $0.59. Inside of said DVR is a 1TB hard drive, so the last 5 of these I’ve purchased have set me back all of $2.95.

Even if you have to buy these things by the pound, it still comes out to only $4 or $5 each, which really isn’t a bad price for a 1TB drive. Yeah, it’s used, but these AV-rated drives are tough and are meant for 24/7 operation.

DISCUSSION (5)

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/17/2016 at 22:51

Obsolete HDDs are fun for plinking.

MM54 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/17/2016 at 22:51

Clever - NAS?

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo
12/17/2016 at 23:11

I like to raid the dead ones for neodymium magnets. After gutting the drive I use the shell to hold a USB hub with four small flash drives. It’s good, tough protection for the hub and drives, and when plugged in it’s got four volumes for 64GB. I can probably make each one bootable to a different OS as a troubleshooting tool. And when larger flash drives drop in price I can easily upgrade the capacity.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > MM54
12/17/2016 at 23:19

At this point I’m just upgrading systems for myself and friends and relatives. I picked up an OptiPlex 980 barebones system for a couple of bucks (outlet center again) and threw a couple of these drives into that to make it functional. It’s actually a pretty decent system, but I’m having really annoying mouse issues when switching systems via the KVM (mouse moves around but clicking on a window deactivates it instead of selecting it; putting the system to sleep and bringing it back seems to fix it, but this is incredibly annoying and unnecessary and nobody seems to have a fix.)

I tend to use hard drives like floppies; I have a stack of them laying around and just plug the one I need into a SATA dock. They seem to hold the data much better than CDs or DVDs, many of which I can’t seem to read just a few years later.

I could probably take one of these systems that’s sitting around and turn it into a NAS, or perhaps upgrade the RAID 0+1 array on my gaming system. Four drives for 320GB might have been OK 6 years ago, but it’s laughably small by today’s standards.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
12/18/2016 at 00:00

Past my pay grade...