Contribute
Register

Hard Drive Storage at a Penny per Gigabyte ~ Setup your Home NAS

Status
Not open for further replies.

trs96

Moderator
Joined
Jul 30, 2012
Messages
25,471
Motherboard
Gigabyte B460M Aorus Pro
CPU
i5-10500
Graphics
RX 570
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
  2. Mac mini
Mobile Phone
  1. Android
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LXO7KUD/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

I've bought many new and refurb hard drives from this seller and they've all tested out perfect. Their seller rating on Ebay is 99.9% on over 94,000 reviews. You get a one year warranty on the refurbished drives, 5 years on new ones. This Hitachi 3TB drive is their best value right now. The goharddrive listing on Amazon currently is the best price on this drive anywhere at 10 dollars per Terabyte. Shipping to the U.S. only.
We only ship within the continental United States. We ship to Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico & US Virgin Islands via overnight or second day service only.

You can learn more about the seller @ www.goharddrive.com

1569079043049.png

I know that SSDs have come down in price but if you need 3-4 TB of storage mechanical drives are still your best option. These should work fine in a NAS. They spin at a rate of 5700 RPM to stay cooler and use less energy.

Even a 4TB Samsung QVO SSD costs well over $400 and just isn't practical for storing lots of really large files.
Every brand of 2TB sata based SSD cost over $200 right now. I'd pick the $30 Hitachi HDD every time. You could buy fourteen of them for less than one 4TB or two 2TB SSDs. It's good to have that extra capacity if you are creating a few 9 or 12 TB media servers.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L3CLM2B/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Doesn't look like prices will go much lower for HDDs. Prices on SSDs seem stuck at about 10 cents a Gigabyte as the lowest price you can get for a name brand drive.

Screen Shot 24.jpg
 
Last edited:
If you want a new 7,200 RPM 3TB drive from Hitachi the cost is $46.88, nearly 15 dollars more than the 5K3000 drive but you also get a 5 year warranty. 2-3 cents per gigabyte is about the average for new drives. The new Seagate and WD drives on Amazon start at 80 USD. That is closer to 3 cents per GB.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B078PRV23Y/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

If you want just a new 1TB 7,200 RPM drive they sell for $31.99 on the Ebay store.

These are "white label" drives. They are new but without the WD RE4 branding. Originally made for OEMs like Dell and HP that would put their own brand name on them. So these are also a very good deal on new 1 TB drives.

Why go with Hitachi ? In my experience they are the most reliable hard drives you can buy. The research by Backblaze shows this too. I have a Hitachi 2.5" HDD taken from a 2006 Macbook Pro that still works perfectly today 13 years later.
The 40GB HGST drive in my 2005 Mac mini works great too. I use that mini mostly as an iTunes jukebox these days.

Unfortunately, after about 2011/12 Apple switched many Macbooks and MBPs to Toshiba 2.5" drives that are notorious for failing before they should. I've got boxes full of them that I've extracted and replaced with SSDs, from both Mac and Windows laptops that are 2-5 years old.

Screen_Shot_24.jpg

According to the Backblaze data from drives in their servers, the HGST (Hitachi) drives have low failure rates.

Here's an older chart from 2014 that shows how good the HGST 3 TB drives worked in their servers. If you purchased 100 of their 3 TB drives only one would fail on average in the first two years.

Screen Shot 25.jpg
 
Last edited:
What about best SSD deals for a small 240GB boot drive to combine with a 1 TB mechanical hard drive ?

The Adata SU635 240 GB quad layer cell ssds sell for just $28.99 at Amazon right now. They are using the Intel made Nand Flash chips in these ssds so you know the quality is good. So combine one with a 1TB HDD for storage in a budget build.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PLNNDL2/?tag=tonymacx86com-20


The SU630 is the same QLC drive as the SU635. The difference is that the 635 is a slightly newer version.

For my needs a 240GB boot drive is really large. I've still got one older hack that does fine with a 64GB SSD as a boot drive. So to me 240 is almost overkill. If you can get by with smaller 120GB boot drive then go with a PNY CS900 for only 20 dollars.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0722XPTL6/?tag=tonymacx86com-20
 
Last edited:
What about best SSD deals for a small 240GB boot drive to combine with a 1 TB mechanical hard drive ?

Thanks for all this info. What is your preferred way to combine the 2 drives in this scenario above?

In my Hack I did the same as you mention above, but for simplicity the system is on the SSD and I assigned my home folder to the HDD and did not create a fusion drive. It works great, except when installing kexts into S/L/E using a program like kext beast or the like (It just doesn't work, IDK why either). I would like to find a better way, or just get a larger SSD. Any recommendations? Thanks!
 
when installing kexts into S/L/E using a program like kext beast or the like (It just doesn't work, IDK why either)
You mean to /L/E ? That's where most all hackintosh related kexts should go. I wouldn't think that your /L/E folder would get moved to the mechanical drive when you put the Home folder there. Neither /S/L/E nor /L/E reside within your Users/Home folder. Must be something else going on. What guide did you follow for moving the Home folder to a secondary drive ? What you could try is to create another Admin account that doesn't have it's Home folder moved off th SSD and then try to install kexts from that account.
 
Last edited:
Making a 3TB Home NAS for under $215

If you buy two of the 3TB Hitachi HDDs mentioned in post #1 and install them to the Asustor it only costs $214. You've then got two drives to set up in a Raid 1 configuration for redundancy with fault tolerance. This means if one drive fails you just remove it, replace it and then it rebuilds automatically once the new 3TB drive gets installed. If you were to use a RAID 0 setup everything is lost when one of the two drives fails.

3 TB is plenty of room for all your media files that anyone in your family can access from anywhere.

Screen Shot 21.jpg



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MKLKQN5/?tag=tonymacx86com-20

Paying for this much cloud storage at over $100 per year (even more some places) for many years adds up quickly. This home NAS makes a lot more sense. Your data is right within your home and you are in control of it.

Rates per month for iCloud storage from Apple

Screen Shot 21.jpg

So in the USA 2TB of storage costs $120 a year. The Asustor NAS and two drives would pay for themselves in less than two years. In other North/South American countries Cloud storage costs even more than in the US.
 
Last edited:
What guide did you follow for moving the Home folder to a secondary drive ? What you could try is to create another Admin account that doesn't have it's Home folder moved off th SSD and then try to install kexts from that account.

Hi,
#1) I used the Apple method, in 10.12 under Preferences>Users
#2) Yes, I do think I mean putting kexts into /L/E.
-Every program I tried, seemed to fail at installing kexts into /L/E and only doing it via the terminal worked. I am glad to hear it's not universally that way and was something I did on my end! I did link the home folder to a partition of a larger disk. Maybe that was the issue?

I will be upgrading to 10.14 soon and plan to buy a 500GB SSD and keep the home folder on it, to try to keep it simpler for me.
 
Why not just buy an Apple Time Capsule instead of a NAS ? You are limited to a single 3.5" HDD, so no RAID 1 option. There is no room for airflow in these and the HDD runs hotter, fails sooner.

Also, because it's a PITA simply to upgrade the HDD inside of it. More stupid Apple closed, proprietary product nonsense.
They are designed so that when the hard drive fails, you throw it away and buy a new one. Problem is that Apple no longer makes these so to find a new one for sale you go to Ebay and pay over $300 for one.

You've probably already got a wifi router anyway so you don't need the Airport part of this.

 
Last edited:
Too bad the higher capacity drives aren't this cheap yet... I want to replace some of the 8TB drives in my NAS with 14 or 16TB drives... Technically, I can add more drives to the NAS to expand capacity but I want to keep it at the current drive count for heat and power consumption reasons.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top