[HN Gopher] Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Testing two 18 TB white label SATA hard drives from datablocks.dev
        
       https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...
        
       Author : thomasjb
       Score  : 122 points
       Date   : 2025-10-06 09:36 UTC (5 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ounapuu.ee)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ounapuu.ee)
        
       | econ wrote:
       | OT
       | 
       | > Half of tech YouTube has been sponsored by companies like...
       | 
       | It just struck me that the product reviews are a part of the
       | social realm that is barely explored.
       | 
       | Imagine a video website like TikTok or YouTube etc where all
       | videos are organized under products. Priority to those who
       | purchased the product and a category ranked by how many similar
       | products you've purchased.
       | 
       | The thing sort of exists currently in some hard to find corner of
       | TEMU etc but there are no channels or playlists.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | The reason you don't see videos arranged by product is because
         | everyone knows not to trust unknown creators telling you how
         | great a product is.
         | 
         | Viewers want to see opinions from specific people they've come
         | to trust, not the first video that comes up for a product.
        
           | aspenmayer wrote:
           | Coincidentally or not, those folks who have more subscribers
           | usually charge more for their consideration. That's why I
           | generally trust Steve of Gamers Nexus more than other folks,
           | because they don't do ads except for promoting their own
           | products, so there's no conflict of interest. On the one
           | hand, Gamers Nexus doesn't manufacture their own hard drives,
           | but on the other, they publish their methodology and have a
           | reputation to uphold, so I would trust their judgement
           | regarding testing computer hardware more than folks who do
           | engage in outside advertising.
        
           | markerz wrote:
           | Alternatively, unknown creators have less incentive to
           | falsely promote or lie. It's the reason I tend to trust
           | random strangers on Reddit than popular YouTubers who have
           | achieved monetization and sponsorship.
        
           | econ wrote:
           | They don't have to tell you anything. Just unbox and show
           | what they got.
           | 
           | I just purchased a bicycle chain cleaning device. It was
           | absurdly cheap. The plastic was extruded poorly, it was hard
           | to assemble, it was not entirely obvious how to use it.
           | However! It did the job and it barely got dirty. I expected
           | it to be full of rusty oil both inside and outside but it
           | accumulated just a tiny smudge on the inlet. If anyone made a
           | video it would be a fantastic product.
        
             | noAnswer wrote:
             | 1. You could be that anyone.
             | 
             | 2. The world is filled to the brim with videos about
             | "fantastic products".
        
             | ghostly_s wrote:
             | God, the flood of absolutely useless "review" videos Amazon
             | has incentivized customers to shit all over their site
             | which are nothing more than unboxings are the worst thing
             | about that ecosystem. No thank you.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | I don't trust big channels _especially_ , because I assume
           | they have just sold themselves out to the biggest sponsor.
           | Influencers only exist due to campaign deals, where companies
           | try to sneak their ads into your mind by abusing your
           | inclination to trust another human being. All of it is
           | sickening.
           | 
           | In comparison, I'd rather read a general review magazine with
           | a long history. At least they don't try to trick me into
           | believing they are working out of the goodness of their
           | hearts, and they usually aren't married to a single big
           | sponsor.
           | 
           | Online reviews are broken beyond repair.
        
             | ghostly_s wrote:
             | >I'd rather read a general review magazine with a long
             | history.
             | 
             | Do any of these still exist?
        
         | numpad0 wrote:
         | There's Kakaku.com[1] in Japanese Internet for all consumer
         | electronics, Minkara for cars, bookmeter.com for books, and
         | 5ch.net as fallback. It's surprising that there's only
         | Goodreads on English Internet that everyone have heard of...
         | 
         | 1: https://review.kakaku.com/review/K0001682323/ |
         | https://review-kakaku-com.translate.goog/review/K0001682323/...
        
       | speedgoose wrote:
       | I admire the courage to store data on refurbished Seagate hard
       | drives. I prefer SSD storage with some backups using cloud cold
       | storage, because I'm not the one replacing the failing hard
       | drives.
        
         | stirlo wrote:
         | And I prefer to have a healthy bank account balance.
         | 
         | Storing 18TB (let alone with raid) on SSDs is something only
         | those earning Silicon Valley tech wages can afford.
        
           | patrakov wrote:
           | Not really. I know that my sleep is worth more than the
           | difference between HDD and SSD prices, and I know the
           | difference between the failure rates and the headache caused
           | by the RMA process, so I buy SSDs.
           | 
           | In essence, what we together are saying is that people with
           | super-sensitive sleep that are also easily upset, and that
           | don't have ultra-high salaries, cannot really afford 18 TB of
           | data (even though they can afford an HDD), and that's true.
        
             | gambiting wrote:
             | Well, again, well done on being able to afford it. I have
             | 24TB array on cheap second hand drives from CEX for about
             | PS100 each, using DrivePool - and guess what, if one of
             | them dies I'll just buy another PS100 second hand drive.
             | But also guess what - in the 6 years I had this setup, all
             | of these are still in good condition. Paying for SSDs
             | upfront would have been a gigantic financial mistake(imho).
        
         | jabart wrote:
         | Every drive is "used" the moment you turn it on.
        
           | malfist wrote:
           | There's a big difference between used as in I just bought
           | this hard drive and have used it for a week in my home
           | server, and used as in refurbished drive after years of hard
           | labor in someone else's server farm
        
             | deodar wrote:
             | Drive failure rate versus age is a U-shaped curve. I
             | wouldn't distrust a used drive with healthy performance and
             | SMART parameters.
             | 
             | And you should use some form of redundancy/backups anyway.
             | It's also a good idea to not use all disks from the same
             | batch to avoid correlated failures.
        
             | kklimonda wrote:
             | datablocks.dev has a page explaining what white label and
             | recertified disks are [1]. Those are not disks used for
             | years under heavy load.
             | 
             | 1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-
             | recertified...
        
             | jabart wrote:
             | Enterprise drives are way different than anything consumer
             | based. I wouldn't trust a consumer drive used for 2 years,
             | but a true enteprise drive has like millions of hours left
             | of it's life.
             | 
             | Quote from Toshiba's paper on this. [1]
             | 
             | Hard disk drives for enterprise server and storage usage
             | (Enterprise Performance and Enterprise Capacity Drives)
             | have MTTF of up to 2 million hours, at 5 years warranty,
             | 24/7 operation. Operational temperature range is limited,
             | as the temperature in datacenters is carefully controlled.
             | These drives are rated for a workload of 550TB/year, which
             | translates into a continuous data transfer rate of 17.5
             | Mbyte/s[3]. In contrast, desktop HDDs are designed for
             | lower workloads and are not rated or qualified for 24/7
             | continuous operation.
             | 
             | From Synology
             | 
             | With support for 550 TB/year workloads1 and rated for a 2.5
             | million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), HAS5300 SAS
             | drives are built to deliver consistent and class-leading
             | performance in the most intense environments. Persistent
             | write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity
             | for your mission-critical applications.
             | 
             | [1] https://toshiba.semicon-
             | storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss-v...
             | 
             | [2] https://www.synology.com/en-
             | us/company/news/article/HAS5300/...
        
               | Spooky23 wrote:
               | There isn't a significant difference between "enterprise"
               | and "consumer" in terms of fundamental characteristics.
               | They have different firmware and warranties, usually
               | disks are tested more methodically.
               | 
               | Max operating range is ~60C for spinning disks and ~70C
               | for SSD. Optimal is <40-45C. The larger agents facilties
               | afaik tend to run as hot as they can.
        
               | kvemkon wrote:
               | > drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.
               | 
               | It doesn't apply for the single drive, only for a large
               | number of drives. E.g. if you have 100000 drives (2.4
               | million hours MTTF) in a server building with the
               | required environmental conditions and maximum workload,
               | be prepared to replace a drive once a day in average.
        
           | numpad0 wrote:
           | Returns are known bads.
        
         | Aurornis wrote:
         | I would also prefer having a large number of high capacity SSDs
         | so I could replace my spinning hard drives.
         | 
         | But even the cheapest high capacity SSD deals are still a lot
         | more expensive than hard drive array.
         | 
         | I'll continue replacing failing hard drives for a few more
         | years. For me that has meant zero replacements over a decade,
         | though I planned for a 5% annual failure rate and have a spare
         | drive in the case ready to go. I could replace a failed drive
         | from the array in the time takes to shut down, swap a cable to
         | the spare drive, and boot up again.
         | 
         | SSDs also need to be examined for power loss protection. The
         | results with consumer drives are mixed and it's hard to find
         | good info about how common drives behave. Getting enterprise
         | grade drives with guaranteed PLP from large on-onboard
         | capacitors is ideal, but those are expensive. Spinning hard
         | drives have the benefit of using their rotational inertia to
         | power the drive long enough to finish outstanding writes.
        
           | dleeftink wrote:
           | Curious, what's the use case for wanting your data backed-up
           | without fail? Is it personal archives or otherwise (business)
           | archive related?
           | 
           | Not to say you shouldn't backup your data, but personally I
           | wouldn't be to affected if one of my personal drives errored
           | out, especially if they contained unused personal files from
           | 10+ years ago (legal/tax/financials are another matter).
        
             | EvanAnderson wrote:
             | Any data I created, paid to license, or put in significant
             | work to gather has to be backed-up with 3-2-1 rule. Stuff I
             | can download or otherwise obtain again is best effort but
             | not mandatory backup.
             | 
             | Mainly I don't want to lose anything that took work to make
             | or get. Personal photos, videos, source code, documents,
             | and correspondence are the highest priority.
        
           | cm2187 wrote:
           | You can find cheap used enterprise SSDs on ebay. But the
           | problem is that even the most power efficient enterprise SSD
           | (SATA) idle at like 1w. And given the smaller capacities, you
           | need many more to match a hard drive. In the end HDD might
           | actually consume less power than an all flash array +
           | controllers if you need a large capacity.
        
         | mvanbaak wrote:
         | I have a dozen refurbished exos disk in my storage machine.
         | Works super! SSD for bigger storage is simply too expensive
        
         | LorenPechtel wrote:
         | RAID. Preferably RAID 6. Much, much better to build a system to
         | survive failure than to prevent failure.
        
           | dragontamer wrote:
           | Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically,
           | likely because CPUs are finally powerful enough to run all
           | those calculations without much of a hassle.
           | 
           | Software solutions like Windows Storage Spaces, ZFS, XFS,
           | unRAID, etc. etc are "just better" than traditional RAID.
           | 
           | Yes, focus on 2x parity drive solutions, such as ZFS's
           | "raidz2", or other such "equivalent to RAID6" systems. But
           | just focus on software solutions that more easily allow you
           | to move hard drives around without tying them to motherboard-
           | slots or other such hardware issues.
        
             | f_devd wrote:
             | FYI XFS is not redundant, also RAID usually refers to
             | software RAID these days.
             | 
             | I like btrfs for this purpose since it's extremely easy to
             | setup over cli, but any of the other options mentioned will
             | work.
        
               | zozbot234 wrote:
               | btrfs RAID is quite infamous for eating your data. Has it
               | been fixed recently?
        
               | f_devd wrote:
               | I believe RAID5/6 is still experimental (although I
               | believe the main issues were worked out in early 2024),
               | I've seen reports of large arrays being stable since
               | then. It's still recommended to run metadata in
               | raid1/raid1c3.
               | 
               | RAID0/1/10 has been stable for a while.
        
               | cerved wrote:
               | No. RAID 5/6 is still fundamentally broken and probably
               | won't get fixed
        
             | lproven wrote:
             | > Don't RAID these days. Software won rather drastically
             | 
             | RAID does not mean or imply _hardware_ RAID controllers,
             | which you seem to incorrectly assume.
             | 
             | Software RAID is still 100% RAID.
        
         | cm2187 wrote:
         | Might be a bit adventurous for primary storage (though with
         | enough backup and redundancy, why not). But seems perfect for
         | me for backup / cold storage.
        
       | hddherman wrote:
       | Hello, author here! It's a nice surprise to notice my own post
       | here, but the timing is unfortunate as I'm shuffling things
       | around on my home server and will accidentally/intentionally take
       | it offline for a bit.
       | 
       | Here's a Wayback Machine copy of the page when that does happen:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20251006052340/https://ounapuu.e...
        
       | leobg wrote:
       | I was about to buy a NAS. I find the idea of using an old laptop
       | instead interesting. Especially since it comes with UPS built in.
       | 
       | The author is using a ThinkPad T430.
       | 
       | Any experiences?
        
         | tw04 wrote:
         | If you don't need any performance it's a great backup strategy.
         | If your only way of connecting the drives to the laptop is USB
         | I would be concerned about data integrity if it's important
         | data.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Why is USB so bad at data integrity. Doesn't it have error
           | detection/correction? If so, that sounds like a huge design
           | flaw.
        
             | beagle3 wrote:
             | Individual writes are safe, in my Experience with thousands
             | of uSB drives in many configurations, some with 12 2tb
             | drives hanging on multiple USB hubs at the same time.
             | 
             | However, there are disconnects/reconnects every now and
             | then. If you use a standard raid over these usb drives,
             | almost every disconnect/reconnect will trigger a rebuild --
             | and rebuilds take many hours. If you are unlucky enough to
             | have multiple disconnects during a rebuild, you are in
             | trouble.
        
               | amelius wrote:
               | I've had bitflips with USB transfers of 1-10TB. I don't
               | remember the specifics, but my personal confidence in USB
               | is low.
        
         | beala wrote:
         | The official TrueNAS docs recommend against using USB drives
         | [1]. My understanding is that between the USB controller, flaky
         | connectors and cables, and usb-to-sata bridges of varying
         | quality, there are just too many unknowns to guarantee a
         | reliable experience. For example, I've heard that some usb-to-
         | sata controllers will drop commands and not report SMART data.
         | That said, there are of course many people on the internet who
         | have thrown caution to the wind and report that it's working
         | fine for them.
         | 
         | Personally I'm in the process of building a NAS with an old 9th
         | gen Intel i5. Many mobos support 6 SATA ports and three
         | mirrored 20 TB pairs is enough storage for me. I'm guessing
         | it'll be a bit more power hungry than a ugreen/synology/etc
         | appliance but there will also be plenty of headroom for running
         | other services.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/gettingstarted/coreha...
        
           | mannyv wrote:
           | Been using like 7 external usb drives with 40-50tb total for
           | a few years with no issues. Not raid, just backing up drive
           | to drive. No controller or drive issues. Mix of seagate and
           | wd 8/12/16gb.
           | 
           | I hate blanket recommendations like this by docs. To me, it
           | just sounds like some guy had a problem a few times and now
           | it's canon. It's like saying "avoid Seagate because their 3tb
           | drives sucked." Well they did, but now they seem to be fine.
        
             | zettabomb wrote:
             | RAID is much different. You can try it over USB, you won't
             | have a good time. TrueNAS is primarily talking about RAID
             | users.
        
               | beala wrote:
               | Yes I should have specified that this advice is specific
               | to RAID configurations in NAS applications.
               | 
               | If you're occasionally copying data to an external USB
               | drive, that's totally fine. That's what they were
               | designed for.
               | 
               | The issue is that they were not designed for continuous
               | use, or much more demanding applications like
               | rebuilding/resilvering a drive. It's during these
               | applications that issues occur, which is a double whammy,
               | because it can cause permanent data loss if your USB
               | drive fails during a recovery operation. I did a little
               | more research after posting my last comment and came
               | across this helpful post on the TrueNAS forums going into
               | more depth: https://forums.truenas.com/t/why-you-should-
               | avoid-usb-attach...
        
               | jcalvinowens wrote:
               | YMMV. I have a 4-drive 20TB mdraid10 across two different
               | $50 USB3.0 2-drive enclosures, I've read _petabytes_ off
               | this array with years of uptime and absolutely zero
               | problems. And it runs on one of those $300 off brand
               | NUCs. The 2.5G NIC is the bottleneck on reads.
        
             | Yokolos wrote:
             | What may work anecdotally can't necessarily be used for
             | official recommendations for a large range of users across
             | an unknown range of hardware configurations. If it works
             | for you, that's fine. That isn't sufficient to make a
             | general statement that everybody will be fine using
             | external USB drives, particularly for RAID, especially when
             | people will then make you responsible if something goes
             | wrong for not making sufficiently safe recommendations. You
             | understand that, right?
        
             | cerved wrote:
             | Is that with ZFS or something else?
             | 
             | Mainly I wouldn't do it because of there's space and SATA
             | ports it seems stupid. Hotter. Worse HW.
             | 
             | Can't really see much good reason to do it tbh except it's
             | in a small hot case which is relatively easy to move
             | around. Maybe if you do occasionally backups and you don't
             | care about scrubbing and redundancy? Otherwise why not
             | shuck them and throw them in a case?
        
           | bluedino wrote:
           | I've had the same thing from random disconnects etc from
           | various USB hard drives and SSD's over the years.
        
         | whazor wrote:
         | When I used a laptop as server, the battery became a spicy
         | pillow. I think laptops are not designed to be running
         | continuously and on warmer temperatures than normal.
        
         | m2has wrote:
         | I've use an P51 for about a year now with no issues. I
         | initially bought 6bay DAS, but I've since moved to pure SSD
         | storage inside the laptop.
        
         | dheera wrote:
         | > I was about to buy a NAS.
         | 
         | The UNAS Pro 8 just came out and I'm thinking about getting it,
         | switching away from my aging Synology setup ... only thing I
         | wish it had was a UPS server as my Synology currently serves
         | that purpose to trigger other machines to shut down ...
        
           | ericd wrote:
           | I'm considering doing the same, I guess one would basically
           | just be splitting functions, a dedicated NAS, and a dedicated
           | server for all the functions that Synos tend to perform
           | (generally not very well, but at least with pretty low power
           | usage).
        
           | Xss3 wrote:
           | I think they just released some new prosumer ups.
        
           | VTimofeenko wrote:
           | I believe Synology's UPS monitoring is based on nut-
           | server[1]. In my setup, I am running the server on a separate
           | machine that reads UPS state over USB and Synology is just a
           | client. Maybe UNAS could also just work as a client.
           | 
           | [1]: https://networkupstools.org/
        
         | rovr138 wrote:
         | You can. It works fine if you know the limitations. An
         | important one is, drives could disconnect, so traditional RAID
         | wouldn't be good.
         | 
         | If you want redundancy, look at something like SnapRAID,
         | http://www.snapraid.it
         | 
         | If you want to combine into a single volume, consider rclone.
         | These remotes specifically are the ones I'm thinking could be
         | useful,
         | 
         | - https://rclone.org/local/
         | 
         | - https://rclone.org/combine/
         | 
         | - https://rclone.org/cache/
         | 
         | Good luck o7
        
         | phil21 wrote:
         | I ran an old Thinkpad as a home router and small home
         | server/NAS device for quite a long time, usually swapping out
         | my old work upgrades every 3 years or so.
         | 
         | They all had onboard gige so it worked fine - native vlan for
         | the inbound Comcast connection, tagged vlans out to a switch
         | for the various LAN connections.
         | 
         | They were from the era of DVD drives so I was able to put an
         | extra HDD in the DVD slot to expand storage with. One model
         | even had a eSATA port.
         | 
         | They worked great. Built-in UPS and they come with a reliable
         | crash cart built-in!
        
         | tombert wrote:
         | I don't use a laptop, but I use something fairly adjacent: the
         | Beelink SER6 (https://www.amazon.com/Beelink-4-75GHz-
         | PCIe4-0-Supports-HDMI...), which is basically a gaming laptop
         | converted into a small desktop. For the most part, it has
         | actually been pretty great. It's quiet, has a CPU that is much
         | better than I expected, and a decent enough GPU to do hardware
         | transcoding for Jellyfin without much issue.
         | 
         | I use USB chassis of hard drives to work as the "NAS" part, and
         | it works fairly well, and this box is also my router (using a
         | 10 GbE thunderbolt adapter) though my biggest issue comes with
         | large updates in NixOS.
         | 
         | For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, when I
         | do a very large system update (rebuilding Triton-llvm for
         | Immich seems to really do it), the internal network will
         | consistently cut out until I reboot the machine. I _can_ log in
         | through the external interface with Tailscale and my phone, so
         | the machine itself is fine, but for whatever reason the
         | internal network will die.
         | 
         | And that's kind of the price you pay for using a non-server to
         | do server work. It will generally work pretty well, but I find
         | that it does require a bit more babysitting than a rack mount
         | server did.
        
         | IgorPartola wrote:
         | For me it was important to have ECC RAM and laptops pretty much
         | never have that. My personal recommendation is an old
         | IBM/Lenovo workstation tower as the base. I bought one for $35
         | on eBay and added $40 of RAM (32GB). A $10 UPS from Goodwill
         | with a $25 battery from Amazon, and whatever hard drives you
         | want. I run Ubuntu and ZFS on it but next time would probably
         | opt for FreeBSD for a nicer OS.
        
         | cerved wrote:
         | I own this and it's worth it's weight in gold
         | https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T...
         | 
         | Yes. It's pricey but it's never been a problem. It can connect
         | like 12 HDDs with 256GB ram and has 10GBe and runs at a tiny
         | TDP. Has IPMI. Fits in a tiny case.
         | 
         | The only issue I had with this motherboard was that it was
         | difficult to find someone who sold it. Love it
         | 
         | Also I don't see the built-in UPS. The external drives still
         | use external power
        
       | buckle8017 wrote:
       | These drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial.
       | 
       | White labeling avoids lawsuits.
        
       | aftbit wrote:
       | I've been considering "de-enterprising" my home storage stack to
       | save power and noise and gain something a bit more modular.
       | Currently I'm running on an old NAS 1U machine that I bought on
       | eBay for about $300, with a raidz2 of 12x 18TB drives. I have yet
       | to find a good way to get nearly that much storage without going
       | enterprise or spending an absolute fortune.
       | 
       | I'm always interested in these DIY NAS builds, but they also feel
       | just an order of magnitude too small to me. How do you store ~100
       | TB of content with room to grow without a wide NAS? Archiving
       | rarely used stuff out to individual pairs of disks could work, as
       | could running some kind of cluster FS on cheap nodes
       | (tinyminimicro, raspberry pi, framework laptop, etc) with 2 or 4x
       | disks each off USB controllers. So far none of this seems to
       | solve the problem that is solved quite elegantly by the 1U
       | enterprise box... if only you don't look at the power bill.
        
         | dragontamer wrote:
         | I have to imagine that the best NAS build is simply a 6-core or
         | 8-core standard AMD or Intel with a few HBA controllers and
         | maybe 10Gbit SPF+ fiber or something.
         | 
         | "Old server hardware" for $300 is a bit of a variation, in that
         | you're just buying something from 5 years ago so that its
         | cheaper. But if you want to improve power-efficiency, buy a CPU
         | from today rather than an old one.
         | 
         | --------
         | 
         | IIRC, the "5 year old used market" for servers is particularly
         | good because many datacenters and companies opt for a ~5-year
         | upgrade cycle. That means 5-year-old equipment is always being
         | sold off at incredible rates.
         | 
         | Any 5-year-old server will obviously have all the features you
         | need for a NAS (likely excellent connectivity, expandibility,
         | BMS, physical space, etc. etc.). Just you have to put up with
         | power-efficiency specs of 5 years ago.
        
           | hypercube33 wrote:
           | Dell R500 series is very good for dense storage at low costs
           | if you lean to SATA or NL-SAS
        
         | toast0 wrote:
         | If you want 100TB, you need a bigger NAS than most, and that
         | makes most of the DIY NAS not so good. 2-4 drives seems to be
         | where DIY shines. These days motherboards often stop at 4x
         | sata, so you'll need a HBA or USB (eww).
         | 
         | Personally, I just don't have that much data, 24TB mirrored for
         | important data is probably enough, and I have my old mirror set
         | avaialable for media like recorded tv and maybe dvds and blu-
         | rays if I can figure out a way to play them that I like better
         | than just putting the discs in the machine.
        
         | scottlamb wrote:
         | > How do you store ~100 TB of content with room to grow without
         | a wide NAS?
         | 
         | In the cloud (S3) or on offline (unpowered HDDs or tapes or
         | optical media) I suppose. Most people just don't store that
         | much content.
         | 
         | > So far none of this seems to solve the problem that is solved
         | quite elegantly by the 1U enterprise box... if only you don't
         | look at the power bill.
         | 
         | What kind of power bill are you talking about? I'd expect the
         | drives to be about 10W each steady state (more when spinning
         | up), so 180W. I'd expect a lower-power motherboard/CPU running
         | near idle to be another 40W (or less). If you have a 90%
         | efficient PSU, then maybe 250W in total.
         | 
         | If you're way more than that, you can probably swap out the old
         | enterprisey motherboard/RAM/CPU/PSU for something more modern
         | and do a lot better. Maybe in the same case.
         | 
         | I'm learning 1U is pretty unpleasant though. E.g. I tried an
         | ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 in a Supermicro CSE-813M. A standard IO
         | panel is higher than 1U. If I remove the IO panel, the
         | motherboard does fit...but the VRM heatsink also was high
         | enough that the top case bows a bit when I put it on. I guess
         | you can get smaller third party VRM heat sinks, but that's
         | another thing to deal with. The CPU cooler options are limited
         | (the Dynatron A42 works, but it's _loud_ when the CPU draws a
         | lot of power). 40mm case fans are also quite loud to move the
         | required airflow. You can buy noctuas or whatever, but they won
         | 't really keep it cool. The ones that actually do spin very
         | fast and so are very loud. You must have noticed this too,
         | although maybe you have a spot for the machine where you don't
         | hear the noise all the time.
         | 
         | I'm trying 2U now. I bought and am currently setting up an
         | Innovision AS252-A06 chassis: 8 3.5" hot swap bays, 2U, 520mm
         | depth. (Of course you can have a lot more drives if you go to
         | 2.5" drives, give up hot swap, and/or have room for a deeper
         | chassis.) Less worry about if stuff will fit, more room for
         | airflow without noise.
        
         | cerved wrote:
         | Nah buy the right enterprise gear instead
         | 
         | https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/A2SDi-H-T...
        
           | hypercube33 wrote:
           | I'd really dig a version of this with a Ryzen AI chip and
           | 128gb of ram.
           | 
           | I'm moving to Lenovo tiny m75q series for now due to low idle
           | power and heat generated.
        
       | hexagonwin wrote:
       | What exactly are these "white label drives"? Aren't these just
       | normal seagate exos drives with SMART information wiped and
       | labels removed? i.e. just a worse used drive.
        
         | bluedino wrote:
         | Weren't shucked drives (removed from enclosures) referred to as
         | White label drives at one point?
        
         | ghostly_s wrote:
         | Trying to think of reasons why the manufacturer wouldn't want
         | their name on them and none of them are good. And for not even
         | much of a discount.
        
       | lofaszvanitt wrote:
       | I never understood why they let Seagate et al do this game about
       | hard drives. If they offer a warranty, then replace the drive to
       | brand new, and shove the recertified, fixed whatever bullshit up
       | your wahzoo.
        
       | walrus01 wrote:
       | I was hoping for a full text dump of the SMART data from the
       | drives.
        
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