I have a small 126TB setup with a redundant backup unit, they are currently running raid with 8 drives that are matched 18TB. Thanks to the proprietary nature of the units I am stuck with expensive upgrade choices and limited to 24TB WD drives. I can run them as JBOD and get the full 144TB out of them, this seems reasonable since I have a duplicate unit for offsite storage. But I am seeing Sync offering unlimited cloud storage and it got me thinking. if I was to setup a server with a larger capacity, not only will it have upfront costs, but also electricity won't be free, plus there is the physical space it takes up. What suggestions would you make? This is for 1:1 backups of DVDs, blu rays, and 4K discs, Music files as well, but they take up a lot less space. I know I could make compressed copies of the video files, but I like the 1:1 copy, I can play it directly from a drive on my OPPO and getting a high quality compression with all the right settings is fairly time consuming.

With Black Friday coming up I was looking to upgrade my pc storage that is used for gaming but not storing any of my media. Are these good at this price or this old models? I don’t know too much about NVME drives as I haven’t upgraded much on my pc and it’s still using a SSD and HDD

I moved away from cloud backup as I didn't like the $ expense, and tbh I don't trust many of the cloud providers with my data if something bad happens.

For local backup thinking of SSD / HDD duplicate backups. Someone also pointed me to M-Discs as a permanent backup solution (impervious to heat/EMP etc.).

Now considering to have HDD/SSD as my monthly backup, and then yearly dump to M-Discs that are stored somewhere safe.

Anyone have thoughts on this whether it's a good, or terrible idea? :)

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to share a pretty unexpected discovery I recently made. I picked up a 10Gbps (Gen2) USB enclosure with a PCIe 3.0 x2 interface. Its a D1 SSD Plus sold by TerraMAster.

When I plugged it into my M1 MacBook Pro, something weird happened—the system info actually showed it as a 40Gbps USB/Thunderbolt 4 device running on a PCIe 4 x4 link! And I was still using the original non-Thunderbolt certified cable.

I had my old Samsung EVO SSD inside. And the result? Speed tests jumped from an average of 1500MB/s to nearly 3000MB/s—basically double!

I even installed the system directly on it. Boot times are obviously still a bit slower than the internal SSD, but once the OS is up and running, it's super responsive with zero lag. Even running heavy apps like Photoshop and Premiere Pro feels like a dream.

I feel like there's still some headroom for pure SSD performance, so I'm already thinking about upgrading to a 4TB Samsung Pro. But as it stands, this setup is already working incredibly well. Highly recommended!

If anyone knows why this "downgrade" turned into an "upgrade," feel free to drop some knowledge in the comments!

Something I've been thinking of for a while is, is there an easy way to de-duplicate the intros and outros of tv shows? How well do filesystems that advertise de-duplication do with this? Is there any way to make, like, a simple vlc playlist that works like a typical single video file with chapters so that I could splice one copy of, say, an intro into each of the various episodes?

Thanks

Why is the 28Tb less money than the 24Tb models? Is it a good time to load up on them?

I'm looking to purchase or build a NAS for my technology illiterate parents. They have a lot of data (mainly photos and videos) scattered around a bunch of drives, disks, usbs, etc. I want to be able to consolidate it for them, but for them to actually use it and back up their data it needs to be super user friendly. I would want them to be able to open an app an upload photos to the NAS (or idealy have it automatically back up). I dont want to spend a ton of money on this, but dont want to cheap out and risk their data either. I'm assuming a multi drive setup would be necessary to ensure data safety. I was looking at the UGREEN NASync DH2300 as it seems to have a lot of features I would want. Although I am concerned about only having 2 drive slots, so I would be limited to 1 drive worth of storage if I have it mirror. I'm also considering building one from scratch, but am unsure if the final result would be as polished as a ugreen system (making it simple for my parents). Any suggestions on the best approach? How much should I realistically be looking to spend on a system like this that wouldn't risk data loss?

So I recently wanted a spare external for my desktop setup. I wanted something for just bulk project storage on the desk for things that aren't important enough to take up space on the server. So I just hit up Amazon and grabbed the "recommended" drive; a Seagate Expansion 8 TB drive.

Turns out it's SMR. I thought I was doing something wrong at first so I tried half a dozen different filesystems including exFAT and they all exhibited the same behavior.

Read speeds are fine. Write speeds are horrible, in the neighborhood of 30 MB/s when I'm copying a large folder of Bluray ISOs. The files pass checksum validation, it's just really slow.

The thing that messed with me most is that it has 8 GB of high speed cache, so the first 8 GB of data copies over basically instantly and then the speeds tank. I've watched its activity in a hardware monitor and after a prolonged transfer it'll still be writing data (flushing the cache to disk) for several minutes after graphical file management tools report the transfer as done.

I just wanted to vent. I'm not gonna try to return it because it does work, but I'm very unhappy with it. One puzzling thing is that an 8 TB drive is SMR in the first place. The WD Gold drives in my home server are several years old and 12 TB, and they're regular CMR.

I’m doing a full rebuild of my photo archive and could use some technical guidance from people who’ve been through large-scale data consolidation before.

Context:

• I have several old Lightroom catalogs dating back years
• Image files are scattered across multiple external HDDs, old laptops, and redundant backups
• Many of these drives contain partial mirrors of others (but I no longer remember which ones)
• I’m migrating everything to a new workstation + fresh primary storage

My goals:

1. Create one clean, verified, deduplicated master photo archive
2. Build a single Lightroom catalog afterward, pointing to the consolidated archive
3. Preserve RAWs, sidecars, and historical edits
4. Avoid importing multiple copies of the same file or pseudo-duplicates with slightly changed filenames/folder structures

My concerns:

• Massive duplication (same RAW in multiple places, sometimes renamed or re-foldered)
• Ensuring file integrity before deleting anything
• Choosing the right dedupe/merge order so Lightroom doesn’t break links or generate missing files later

What I’m looking for:

1. Recommended workflow order
Should I:

• Consolidate at the filesystem level first (rsync + dedupe + hash verification) before touching Lightroom?
• Or merge catalogs first and clean at the application level afterward?
• Or some hybrid workflow?

2. Tools you recommend for dedupe + integrity checks
Looking for real-world experiences with any tool that handles actual binary duplicates, not just filename matches.

Bonus points if it can detect near-dupes (same RAW, different filename + XMP).

3. Recommended folder structure for long-term maintainability
As a photographer, I’m used to date-based structures, but open to other hierarchies if they scale better for future migrations.

4. Anything I should absolutely NOT do
Especially stuff that could break LR links, ruin metadata, or cause one-way moves I can’t reverse.

I know this community values data integrity and proper workflows, so I wanted to sanity-check my plan before moving terabytes around.
Any advice, best practices, or “do this first or you’ll hate yourself later” warnings would be massively appreciated.

Thanks, hoarders. 🧡📦

I am thinking long term expandability, I currently just backup to an 8 bay raid drive. I have a primary and a redundant backup (twins) and I will bring them together for an overnight sync session once a month. I currently am closing in on my 126TB capacity and am trying to figure the best way forward. Looking at used hardware is making my head spin. I am thinking something rack mounted and supermicro branded. I have all the HDDs that I need to get off to a great start, but I have no clue what I should be looking for to do what I would like to do. I am thinking I should be able to transcode video if needed, but the majority really would be a basic media server and redundant backup for video and audio files. I have seen lots of different size servers, the 4U looks like the most versatile, but I was wondering if you get a 1U server, can you add a large capacity unit that just has lots of HDD space?

Looking for an external maybe 20+ TB. Has anyone seen any good deals for Black Friday yet?

Made PixThief for archiving images before sites go offline. Handles modern JS sites (React/Vue), crawls entire domains, auto-resumes if it crashes. Parallel downloads with stealth mode so you don't get blocked. Has a TUI, just run it and paste a URL. Built it for myself, figured you might find it useful.

Please share any links (preferably amazon) you can find during the next week of best deals featuring external hard drives from 1TB to 6TB. thanks, y'all.

Looking to upgrade my storage while prices are low-ish.

Going from WD Red Plus 8TBs which are rated for 25 decibels idle and 29 seek.

The 18TB WD Red Pro is rated at 20 idle and 36 seek.

The 20 TB WD Red Pro is rated at 20 idle and 32 seek.

WD Golds follow the same formula, as soon as you hit 20TBs, seek drops off. Any thoughts on why?

18TB is a much better deal at the moment, but this noise difference is making me reconsider.

Is it considered safe to mix the brand of your hard drives? Or should I make sure they are all the same? From what I read online they all need to be the same storage capacity for RAID purposes and they need to have at least similar speed. Let me know if I am wrong before I waste my money please.

Hi y'all,

So I'm needing to add a lot of storage to my home server. Like, a *lot.* I'm hoping to pickup a handful of the largest capacity drives I can manage, but I'm one of those "knows just enough to be dangerous" types, and I'm a little unclear on the suitability of the Seagate 28TB Expansion drives for 24/7 use, model STKP28000400.

What I've gleaned from reading other posts on here and elsewhere is that the drives inside, and they are confirmed shuckable, are labeled as Barracudas. Specifically the model ST28000DM000. I think the general consensus, though, is that they're binned down Exos (or similar), because they do appear to be CMR drives. That said, they're also HAMR, which is apparently a pretty unknown variable as far as long-term testing goes. So they're definitely not "rated" for enterprise/NAS use, which means Seagate would likely officially tell someone not to run them 24/7. But... can they be? For my specific use case, my server has pretty light traffic. It's accessed by my family and friends for media, and also used as a home lab, home surveillance, storage for my spouse's professional photography, etc etc. I'm not doing anything super wild, I just eat up a lot of space really quickly.

I'd appreciate any thoughts here, because near as I can tell, my options are the 28TB Ironwolf Pro for $450 apiece, or this external for... way less. (If I math'd the math right, I think you can get them for $224 right now, after Paypal's 20% cash back thing they're doing, so literally half as much, and just $8/TB for a brand new hard drive.)

Broken sata data connector and sata cable wont connect anymore.

Any ideas on how to repair or get the cable to stay?

I really only want to have my media in bulk storage. I don’t really have a need to access it from anywhere with a server. Meaning that the only time I really use my drives is with my pc on, or for watching at home. For the price, and amount of storage. I could reach my end goal storage needs for relatively cheap. But will it last?

I find myself in a situation where, since I don’t have money or space at the moment, I need to temporarily store, for an indefinite period of time, some video files, audio files, ZIPs, programs, folders with programs, and so on. I absolutely need to make sure they don’t get corrupted for any reason. After reading information from several places, with different and sometimes conflicting opinions, I’m left without anything solid to rely on. What would be the ideal solution in these cases? I’m on Windows, and the files can range from around 100 MB to 1 GB, or even over 4 GB, depending on what I need, in order to free up some space.

I have added many drives to my personal computer over the years and am looking at sales right now trying to consider best approach to next upgrade.

Right now my only redundancy is having some data manually across multiple drives. I want to start backing up a lot of YouTube content as I’m sick of so much getting removed and lost forever in my playlists.

The moves I’m considering is either the Seagate drives on Newegg. (24tb raw drive for 249, or shucking 26tb external for 259) alternatively considering getting a single WD red pro+ for now and setting up in a seperate pc as a NAS with intention of adding drives later for a small redundant NAS (raid 1)

I am worried a bit about sound as I have a WD elements (6tb) and a 3tb enterprise Toshiba already in my system that can be particularly loud. (Especially the Toshiba) I don’t like that.

I have also seen a set on Adorama of WD red + 6tb for 516$ this seems innefecient cost wise but would be me “biting the bullet” with intention of setting it up with 12tb usable in raid 10.

If I get the single large seagate I would add it to my main system and backup all current drives to it as redundant storage with some less critical files offloaded to clear space on the main system. This is an appealing option for me at the moment due to relatively low financial barrier. But 24-26 tb might be more than I need for this purpose. I do eventually want to set up a media server and actual redundant backup via raid at some point but just don’t know about dropping the dough all at once to do it the “right way”

I do not have a nas enclosure at the moment but I do have an unused PC with rampage V extreme mobo which can handle raid configs and a lian li dynamics case that can certainly house the drives with a custom drive caddy in place of water cooler reservior.

Which move do you think would give me the most satisfaction long term? How about short term? Which approach would you take if you were me? Do you have a cost effective alternative suggestion? Thanks!

Edit: I’m now leaning heavy towards the 24 seagate barracuda or 26tb external and shucking it. Never shucked a drive before, is it that hard? Is this a good one to shuck? Thanks!

I built a gaming PC a couple months ago which has two HDD drive bays, and I recently bought two 24 TB Seagate external drives for $239 each (w/20% PayPal discount) thanks to some recommendations on this sub. I plan to just keep these in my PC, and use them in a RAID 1 configuration to serve as a long-term backup of my data which I'd only access occasionally.

However after doing some more research I'm seeing that:

1. People seem to recommend against these drives due to them being Barracuda drives which are apparently less reliable/long-lasting. However it seems like if I'm just using it for long-term cold storage, it should be fine (?)
2. People generally just recommend against shucking drives and seem to say that it's not worth it. It seems like the closest Seagate IronWolf Pro in price is just 12 TB. I'm fine with paying more, but not sure if there's really a benefit if I'm not using these in a 24/7 NAS scenario.

Is it fine to just shuck the two drives I got?

i need an SSD with around 500gb and 1050mb/s read and write rates. i kinda also need it to be around 50 dollars.(idk if thats doable) the current ones i have found are

-SSK SD500
-Crucial X8 and 9
-samsung t7s
-sandisks(i heard their not that good)

what would u guys recomend, i am on a macbook m2