Well I ended up ordering 2x Kingston DC600M 8TB. Unfortunately while I rarely write something to those drives, when I do it’s usually 2 TB at once or something when migrating backups. I looked at few benchmarks and QVO in 8TB variant looks pretty pathetic. Plus it’s probably gonna depreciate quickly. And it feels off to buy QVO for WRX80 workstation in a sense… Though if I could find QVO for 300$ like you mentioned I probably would go for it. But it didn’t so welp.
By “junk” I mostly meant rapid depreciation and commodity. I literally just found bunch of spare 2TB HDDs in wardrobe bc they’re quite useless nowadays. You can only stack up so many of them before you’re running out of space both physically and in terms of connectivity (and sata power). Like 256gb or 512gb SSDs. Nobody wants them, you end up with lockers filled up with those and nobody can find use for them. I wouldn’t like to end up in situation where if I wanted to buy another 2 drives, it’d make more sense to scrap whole thing and just buy bigger drives instead of extending array.
Those SATA drives have a bit different use case for me since like I mentioned I already do have high performance 2x 2tb 990 pro nvme and 2x 4tb firecuda 530. There’s a bit of interest clash when it comes to NVME storage because 4TB drives for now seem to be faster than 8TB ones (which usually target capacity at cost of performance) thus I went for 4TB NVME instead of 8TB.
At some point I considered going full NVME for bigger storage but it’s really complicated. Pci-e is not all that easy and cheap to split so as a result it’s not that easy to build for example 8 bay RAID array based on nvme storage. I already have WRX80 platform so there’s a ton of pci-e but it’s still… you know, limited. It’s not like SATA where you have 8 ports on board, buy one IBM HBA controller and boom, you have 16 ports. Just like my 14 bay HDD NAS built from old PC with one IBM card and onboard SATA controller on Sandy bridge platform…