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Finally setting up a home NAS

On a whim yesterday I decided to check out the local university's used-surplus sale. I was hoping to find a tape player or maybe a PDA.

I found neither of those, but I *did* find a 6-bay NETGEAR ReadyNAS box for $75, so I snatched that up. When I got home I stuck a junk HDD in it to confirm that it worked, and was able to get it set up through the online interface. It only had a bit of dust that needed to be blown out.

I next needed to buy disks... The expensive part.

I found this tool which lets you compare the prices of disks from various sellers.

I was surprised to find that I could get refurbished 10TB drives for as low as $80 apiece. I was hesitant at first about trying refurbished HDDs for the obvious reasons. After some reading, and given Amazon's 30-day return policy, I went ahead with that option regardless.

The consensus I was finding (on /r/DataHoarder) with regard to refurbs boils down to:

Drives can fail even if they're new, and
The costs I would be saving far outweigh the slightly higher statistical likelihood of one or two failing.

If I get a dud or two, well, that's what RAID-5 and return policies are for.

I'm looking forward to having 50TB of fault-tolerant storage for my partner and myself to stick backups and movies and such on. 😁

🐝 Addison

Jul 29 · 5 months ago · 👍 Ruby_Witch, norayr, sugar

4 Comments ↓

🍄 Ruby_Witch · Jul 30 at 05:18:

I used to refurbish drives as part of my job. Mostly they just wipe the data (thoroughly) and run some tests, then the drives that fail are discarded and the rest are relabeled.

I'd say that they likely have a lower life expectancy than new drives, but they *have* been tested and should work fine for a good long time. Nice to have all of that storage space, isn't it? 🤓

🐙 norayr · Jul 31 at 02:23:

hello, thank you for sharing.

i had no opportunity to share my story today, maybe i'll share later.

but thank you for the link, and i need to get a 10tb drive for such a price.

in short, i have 2, but one, i guess, sort of died. i need to check it yet, though.

🐙 norayr · Jul 31 at 22:16:

so i run a home server since 2010. it had apache with my site and blog, xmpp, email.

then i started to run diaspora in 2012 on it.

and i started to use it as NAS, with public IP at some point, available everywhere. for a year I even kept my whole home on it.

when my laptop os would load, I would start networking, it would start wireguard to my home server. then i would mount my home partition via nfs that listens on wireguard interface.

i used it for a year, but right now my server is not at my home, since i didn't have good internet at some of the places i had to move to. so my friend kept the server. i'll get my home server back home soon.

🐙 norayr · Jul 31 at 22:19:

i am too verbose, realize it. so the story is, in the last update i used two ssds for the / of the os, as mirrored raid. and two 10tb hdds that aren't mirrored via raid. every 7 days the script would mount the second drive and sync the data. that way if i removed something accidentally, there was a probability it would be still on the second drive.

interestingly, second drive failed. but i still have hope that it is the wire, not the drive. i'll get my server back home, and i'll be able to experiment with it, change the wires, let's see.