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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...

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.

These drives are very likely refurbs that are unofficial.

White labeling avoids lawsuits.

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.

The way the story lead with the belief that the drives were likely going to be untrustworthy made me think the author was going to throw them in a system with multiple redundancies or use them as additional parity drives..

god speed!

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.

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?

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.

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.

I was hoping for a full text dump of the SMART data from the drives.