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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

You can buy a 24Tb drive on sale for $240 or so.

Sometimes I wonder why I still try and save disk space :-/

Link? Am both curious and skeptical

https://pricepergig.com/us?minCapacity=24000 shows the cheapest 24TB drive is $269.99 right now, so yeah, with a sale you'll get to $240. But if you're ok with smaller drives, you can get a much better price per gig ratio

Seagate Expansion drives are in this price range and can be shucked. They're not enterprise drives meant for constant operation, the big ones are Barracudas or maybe Exos, but for homelab NAS they're very popular.

I have such a NAS for 8 years, (and a smaller netgear one from maybe 16 years ago), and have yet such a disk fail. But you can get unlucky, buying a supposedly new but "refurbished" item via amazon or the seagate store (so I hear), or have the equivalent of the "death star" HDDs, which had a ridicilously high burnout rate (we measured something like > 10% of the drives failed every week across a fairly large deployhment in the field - major bummer.

If you use such consumer drives, I strongly suggest to make occasional offsite backups of large mostly static files (movies for most people I guess), and frequent backups of more volatile directories to an offsite place, maybe encrypted in the cloud.

Only a fool would have 24Tb of data and entrust it to a single drive. Of course you buy more than one.

Of course you would stagger the offline backups. But if we are talking storing e.g. movies, the worst case scenario is really not so bad (unless you have the last extant copies of some early Dr Who episodes, then BBC would want to have a word with you)

Not trying to account for the parent's claim, but generally check diskprices.com for the latest deals on Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de, .es, .it etc)

Newegg regularly offers sales on hard drives, which is when I buy.

Very possible with sales and especially non nas grade harddisks

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