Things you really need to know about buying a hard drive and how price really isn't the driving factor

The cost of hard drives now a days can be all over the place. They are even more expensive then they use to be. Finding a good deal on a drive that is big enough and has the features we are looking for is usually the most pressing concern for many builds. When I built my media server I knew I was going to have a great many files eventually with sizes over 100GB a video for my un-remuxed 4K content. That means the biggest drives are the best deal given the limited number of drives you can run off your motherboard or fit in your case (without getting into IT mode unlocked SAS PCI cards).

Having built computers every since I was a teenager I have never really had any particular brands that I preferred until I started getting into overclocking, gaming, etc. I have tried dozens of different hard drive manufacturers in my laptops, desktops, modded original Xbox, etc over the years. When I decided to build a media server I thought I would backup whatever was on my old drives from previous builds I just had laying around. This was pre-SSD days and a majority of the drives no longer would boot up and function. Platter drives were never as resilient as what we are all use to these days but they also were pretty easy to tell when they went bad. Long story short only my Seagate HDD drives still worked some as old as 20 years... I guess I have a new favorite hard drive manufacturer.

When I was building my system I got a great deal on some Seagate IronWolf Pro ST14000NE0008 14TB 7200RPM 3.5 SATA 6Gb/s NAS HDD around 160 bucks a piece brand new on ebay. The seller checked out as legit and was very responsive pre (and post) purchase. I thought that was a great deal for the $/TB, was the higher end of Seagates offerings intended specifically for NAS/Server while still having a SATA port since I would be repurposing desktops parts for my server. Additionally, they come with 3 Years of free data recovery should a drive go bad. For those who have never tried to get data off a failed drive it is a very frustrating/very expensive service that has no guarantee of being successful. Data recovery at the manufacturer level of the drives is much more successful so long as the failure isn't due to the drive bursting into flames or some other exotic failure caused by outside forces.

I ended up buying 8 over the course of a year as needed and as I could afford, all from the same place. I had one drive come in bricked and the whole process of getting a replacement through the seller was painless and pleasant. Fast forward to moving the drives to a new case and I ultimately ended up bricking 2 drives that were full of data in the move due to user error sadly. 3 Years free data recovery right so I shouldn't have anything to worry about right? Well the seller told me to mail them the drives and they would see what they can do... in house (not through Seagate). I thought that was awfully suspicious so I asked a dozen other questions about their capabilities, success rates and why it was not getting sent to the manufacturer. The responses did not inspire confidence nor did they clarify whether or not I would be able to get those drives back after sending them in so I could have them professionally restored.

Time to contact Seagate and see if I can get the data recovered under their warranty. I registered the drives I had an issue with as part of their online process and hit a brick wall. I ended up calling Seagate to talk to a real person and see if I could get this figured out. Apparently the drives I purchased from a seller based in the United States had been distributed by Seagate to another continent: Asia. Without an Asian mailing address my warranty was not valid with some explanation of where drives in different markets get service. Not only could I not pay for the difference in shipping to have the responsible repair location do it under warranty as their US retailer deceived (defrauded?) me with a warranty that was not useable but I could not pay for Seagate to do the recovery at a repair location of my choosing.

The Unraid system I am running can recovered the data on as many hard drives as it has parity drives. For more on Unraid server basics see Years of talk about Unraid servers versus reality. If I had installed a second parity drives in my server prior to all this I could have rebuilt the data in the system easily just by installing 2 new hard drives. Due to the growing number of files I had and the budget I had this was not something I had high on my priority list. It's my own fault so I decided just to rebuild the data manually even though it would take months of redoing what I had already done. 2 Years in I had zero other issues with these drives and I still like Seagate quality so I just bought 2 more of the same drives. I decided I would build a server that would serve as a backup of my current server as its best practices anyway.

The moral of the story: Make sure whatever hard drives you are buying were meant by their manufacturer to be sold in the country you live in otherwise you will not have the warranty they come with.