The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/SquirrelActive3179 on 2025-01-04 17:19:36.
I'm currently looking for drives to fill out my first homeserver, and I feel like I've reached the point where I'm overthinking everything way too much in the pursuit of finding the best bang for the buck.
Ideally I wanted to go the "manufacturer refurbished/rectified" route to get more capacity for cheaper while hopefully still having some sort of warranty, but I am residing in Spain, so the easy options of ServerPartDeals and GoHardDrive are out of the question.
My budget is currently limited to 200€ which doesn't leave much room if I want two drives to have some sort of backup. Granted nothing critical would go in there for now (just really big Linux ISOs, not quite datahoarder struck yet but I want to keep them around until I can no longer fit in more), so maybe opting for a better single drive deal can work.
That I've looked at:
- Amazon (with diskprices) new drives quickly go up in €/TB if I want to target two drives. And as for refurbished, I've been hearing more and more CS horror stories, so I don't know if they'd actually help in the case of an issue.
- Ebay (refurb) professional sellers mostly reside outside the EU, and seem just about as risky as Amazon, though some provide "warranties" that may help.
- There's some German sites, and even a Spanish one (with seemingly good reviews) I found mentioned here along my search, but again nothing as widely mentioned as the US sites.
- Finally there's the local 2nd hand site Wallapop for even more offers, though I guess here I'd need to manually scrutinize the drive's health, warranty status, etc
I'm thinking about opting for amazon refurb, but I'm curious about other's experiences when dealing with this in Europe.