As the title suggest I’m looking for 4 hdd for a nas box. Ideally 8 - 12 tb each and for less than $125 each if possible. New and from a company with a good reputation preferred.
I think you’re gonna have a hard time buying new.
Wait for a sale, I guess? The Hitachi 8TB helium Ultrastar listed is right at the lower range of your density, and higher range of your price, and is the only NAS-usable drive I’d say that technically fits the bill for now. That’s not shipped, either.
If you see companies like MaxDigitalData or whatever on ebay, these aren’t actually MDD harddrives. They’re refurbs from Seagate/WD rebranded as new.
Same with the “new” listings on ebay or the like for Seagate or WD drives that fit your budget, these are all refurbs/factory recertified, smart data wiped, and then sold through another vendor without warranty from the manufacturer. Allegedly, you get 3 years or 5 years from the vendor, good luck getting a claim on that after ebay’s returns window, or paypal’s insurance window.
The only four names to look for now are
- Seagate. 8TB(or lower) Barracuda Computes are bad in a NAS. Skyhawk, Ironwolf/Pro, Barracuda Pro, and Exos are fine. The highest end Seagate branded stuff is still B-list though.
- Western Digital. Total clusterfuck on the red, blue, or green lines, red plus or pro is fine. Generally, avoid WD. Overpriced and they have some poor reliability in more recent years. C-tier drives.
- Hitachi is now Western Digital, but a lot of it is still being sold under the Hitachi brand, to differentiate from WD’s increasingly garbage reputation. AFAIK, the only have HM SMR drives, which require special software to treat them as shingled drives. They’ll be labeled as such. Generall, this is grade A drives though. Their older 2~4TB ranges seem to never die.
- Toshiba, which is now mostly owned by Seagate. IIRC, either the 2.5" or 3.5" had to be spun off into an independent again after the buyout because anti-monopoly laws or something, iirc a couple of their datacenter drives are shingled and not labeled well, so do research before you buy any of them. They seem to be good quality drives though.
Just keep an eye on PCPartPicker.com’s harddrive section. Sort by cost/gb, and look for 8~12tb drives every week or so until you find a good deal, and be careful of amazon and newegg. Third party sellers sell refurbs as new.
There’s nothing MSRP that fits your bill.
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Another resource I’ve used to keep tabs on prices is this site:
But yeah, for that price, going to be tough to find new, non-refurbished drives of that capacity.
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This ticks pretty much none of your boxes, but still pretty cheap:
- not a US seller
- top end storage capacity
- not new but refurbished
- A-brand disk(s)
- over the desired budget limit
Same drives, different seller:
Yup, that’s a ready-made NAS set. Convenient, right? 
Do note that sellers from the EU generally have (much!) better protected consumer rights written into their sale contracts. That’s effectively EU law at work (strictly speaking a directive, but national law must not fall below the directive threshold. German Laws on consumer protection are at least on par with said directive, or better). These consumer protections also apply for non-EU customers (AFAIK!) as the point of sale (the shop) is within the EU and therefore subject to these regulations.
FYI: I did not buy from either shop (yet?) so no judgement on those.
Thank you for the information and insights!
I’ll have to wait for a sale or when I get a few more bucks to spare.
Thanks for the resource!
Yea, the us consumer protection laws are kind of a joke. I haven’t tried tried buying directly from a uk / eu site from the us.
I would buy used drives. Usually, about half the price as you buy new.
Beware, stay away SMR drives.
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I don’t mind buying used when the project is just for testing / proof of concept. Since this is housing my data for long term use that is not a risk I’m willing to take.
Your abosolutly correct on the point of smr vs cmr!
Thanks!
Is there redundancy in the nas box? I have bought used SAS hardrives for years off the 'bay and have had very little issue. I do also have a backup solution and lean towards redundancy over storage space, but it has saved me lots of $$$.
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It’s a low end entry level nas box from asustor. It does support raid but nothing like a true server setup. Using it more for a local movie streaming box.
Edit specs:
AS1004T v2
ARMv7 Processor rev 1
512.00 MB
Max 4 3.5" hdd
Currently installed drives
32tb drives
14tb drive
It was cheap for me and just repurposed some desktop drives hence why I’m looking for bigger drives and actual nas rated ones at that.
So i’m currently looking at these for my upgrade. Any reason to keep away from them for a nas?
nah, toshiba drives are good stuff, and those appear to be CMR/PMR(good) rather than SMR(bad).
What kind of raid do you plan to use?
In 1 of the 2 asusstor AS1004T v2 I have. One of them is just in jbod mode and may set it up with 1 redundant drive. The other won’t need to be upgraded for some time as moving the media file over will free up almost half of the drive space.
So very light duty doing media sharing hence why I was looking for cheap nas drive in the first place.