Thanks a lot for this elaboration!

Unfortunately, like mentioned in another comment below, Barracudas are now mostly SMR. And I didn’t find offers for Barracudas Pro which should be CMR.

Anyways, I will most probably buy some smaller CMR drives. Take a bit more money in the hand now, lay out a proper backup strategy and only store data which can not be easily re-downloaded and I should be good.

So if you can use a hot spare is mainly depentend on the OS you use I suppose?

idk which naming scheme is worse: PCIe or USB. Not that I would know too much about transfer speeds but the plethora of different version surely doesn’t help.

I will definitely have to do my homework on all of these transfer rates lol

SAS drives are way cheaper on eBay and such but I don’t know if I feel confident enough to move from SATA to SAS for my first DIY NAS already. It sounds very easy with the PCIe SAS adapter but still daunting at the same time.

Yes I will definitely get a CMR drive, I read enough comments warning me about SMR lol

Yeah I should probably get a little bit extra money in hand but buy something good instead of some garbage.

Would you consider that better even if the backup drive is in the same house as the data drive, just powered off?

Very interesting take, if only SSDs would not be so expensive right now, damn!

But I should probably worry a lot more about my backup strategy than the drives. You are correct

Thanks a lot for this very in depth response! I had to take some time to sit down and properly understand everything so sorry for the late response.

I will take your advice seriously and buy at least three drives of the same size (to get this right, the model or brand doesn’t necessarily need to be the same right?). Because I don’t know if I can afford four of the size I would like to get. One question I still have is, how do you achieve the hot standby? Is this a software feature common NAS OS provide?

Refurbishes server disks you mean exclusively SAS drives or also SATA?

But you need a newish PCIe connection to get decent speeds from the drives no?

I think there are too many technical words I don’t understand yet in this comment, but thanks nonetheless. One I want to ask specifically tough, is a hot spare a disk mirrored every now and then or what do you mean by that?

What do you mean by production run? How could I check that before having them in my hands? And operating hours only applies for used drives no?

I will do some more research on ebay but it is hard to find offers with SMART values and operating hours. The downside of enterprise harddrives is mostly that they are louder right?

So I could use an external hard drive for backups and only turn it on when needed? But it would be very slow as you said.

I know it is a bad time but I planned to stick with my normal external consumer harddrive for another year at least. Should I wait and just hook up an external USB drive to my RPi and use it as a samba share for backups?

I checked for used enterprise drives but I didn’t find anything with SATA for a reasonable price yet, unfortunately.

I think I never heard about AVX before, what is it? And is it a newer technology or why do they both don’t support it?

Thanks a lot! So only for VMs?

After a rather quick look it seems like the DDR3 prices are still kinda fine. I will consider that, thanks!

Yeah power efficency should not be undervalued! But I read that the Wyse 5070 CPUs officially only support 8GB RAM so no big upgrades possible.

Thanks a lot for the heads up!