this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
21 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43796 readers
841 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can you even buy 500 GB HDDs these days? I can get 1tb drives from my local Officeworks for $63AUD, but that's pretty uneconomical when you can get 10tb drives for $360AUD.
Get the largest SSD you can, and buy a HDD later on when you can afford it. You can get slight discounts on HDDs by buying external hard drives and "Shucking" them (removing the casing and using the disk inside). You may need to do some research to work out if it's possible for the drive you want to buy though, not all are shuckable
Never understood why that is but does seem to be the case often enough. So selling the drive with extra parts is somehow cheaper than the bare drive...
Sometimes it's because they use cheap Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives in the external enclosures. These drives are slower and less reliable than the Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives. Some of the cheaper internal drives are also SMR these days. An SMR drive is OK if you just want to write data to it and leave it there, and you're not too worried about the transfer speeds. But if you're doing a lot of intensive activity with many writes and rewrites, it'll slow you down.
They are often Green drives as well. But the latest 10TB ones I bought and shucked a few days ago from WD are not SMR as far as I know? If you are careful with the disassembly and buy from a place with a good returns policy you can always return it if it's SMR.
I think it's an economies of scale thing, more people buy external drives than bare drives, so the price drives down? Does feel very wasteful though, I have a heap of e-waste drive cases :/
Hmm, ok, thank you!