Alright, all you pervy people, there’s a solid sale going on for storage space on Amazon today. Do you NEED 18TB? Probably not, but I can tell you that having 18TB has been a game changer. See a two hour long VR video you like? Download that motherfucker in 8k without a second thought. Keep it forever. Become a horny hoarder! @linuxguy will be so proud of you.
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Server Part Deals | Enterprise Drives — ServerPartDeals.com
has good value if you dont mind refurbed.
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I didn’t bother to post that, as it’s not a specific sale, rather a deal that’s constantly going on, but I’ll second this comment.
That’s where mine came from. Had it since November with zero issues. Obviously it’s not as fast as an SSD, but it’s plenty fast enough to stream VR videos over my wifi to my Quest 2
This is the drive I personally own. 199.95 / $11.11 per TB if you don’t mind refurbished.
This appears to be the cheapest by $/TB, but I cannot vouch for the quality. Probably okay, but no guarantees from me. Again, this is refurbished. NOT NEW. $139.99 Seagate 16 TB or $8.75/TB
@PO0000OP 3 INTERNAL HDD Drives died on me since the March Windows 10 Update.
Since the March Windows 10 Update Windows fucks up the Internal HDD SOFTWARE DRIVERS.
I only use External HDDs now and SSDs.
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My NAS is running on a Pi right now. Was looking at those Synology NAS on sale for Prime Day. Anyone have any experience with those?
BUMMER! I seriously hope that doesn’t happen to me 
2 of them INTERNAL HDD Drives were completely new
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Stablebit drive scanner is an amazing tool that I use across my systems. It will continually monitor SMART as well as test read AND write of each sector once a month (or whatever you set to). Saved my butt several times. I also use it to do a full read write burn in test anytime I get a new drive - before putting any important data on it.
I would heavily recommend against external hard drives for long term or heavy use. They do not have active cooling and are powered by budget wall wart power supplies (also with no active cooling). There’s a reason that servers and mission critical systems don’t have a bunch of external hard drives plugged into the rack. They have their uses, for easy backup and cold storage, shucking, or for people who don’t know how to install additional drives or that have bad cases.
Properly cooled internal drives plugged into a good controller with good cables with a good burn in and ongoing testing process is the best bet for reliability and longevity.
Lastly, no storage is perfect. If you care about your data at all you want to do backups - preferably to another machine, cloud, offline.
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I just got one of these docking stations plus 6TB hard drive today. NEXIN NEX-DS1U3 USB 3.0 Hard Drive Docking Station + WL 6TB 3.5" SATA Hard Drive (Combo) - Retail
I got this specifically for backing up my library. I’ve been using usb external hard drives for playing my library. I’ve got one on a laptop connected to the router for streaming 2K+ and VR files to my VR headset, and I have another for a different laptop for non VR use. I know how to format and use those other hard drives, but I’m at a loss for what to do with this one. It doesn’t show up on my computer (Windows) except on the usb “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media” part of the taskbar. I just want to fill it to the brim with filthy smut, but does that mean I still have to install an operating system on it before I can do anything? Would anyone like to be so kind as to help this dummy out?
I am not an expert but i have encountered this problem in the past as well under a MS windows system.
What ever you do as a next step: Unplug other external hard drives safely before!
What I do in this cases with MS windows systems:
- Checking if the external component (docking station) has or needs driver. The manual should explain the further steps.
- Trying another USB cable from hard drive to pc.
- Trying all other USB sockets on you pc.
Sometimes it needed a reboot to show the hard drive in file explorer.
If that wasn’t successfull I try the following:
- Open up disk management. If the hard drive is showing up there: Formatting the hd manually. If the hard drive is still not visible in file explorer I assign the drive letter manually.
Double check that you are working on the correct hard drive before formatting or assign drive letters. Handling a wrong hard disk with these steps is potentially fatal for the stored data.
Hope this is helpfull. Please be very carefull with your system. Data loss can be very annoying.
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I need to update my NAS. Been using a Raspberry Pi and get like 25 Mbps file transfer on a good day. Been looking at an Asustor NAS but have been dragging my feet
@Filbert Thanks for the help! 
After restarting my computer, it still didn’t show up like a normal drive. I’m following these instructions right now. How to format your drive on Windows | Support Seagate US I can’t tell how long it will take, but I imagine it will take a long time since I unchecked the “quick format” option. Opening up disk management, and doing things through there was not obvious to me since I’ve never even seen that utility before.
I’m glad it worked out this way. Sadly I never found an explanation why ms windows comes up with this ugly behaviour. Sometimes it is enough to assign a drive letter to show the hard disk in the file explorer and sometimes I had to format it first.
Maybe it’s a feature and not a bug, but I can’t see the advantage. But as I wrote before: I am not an expert. Mounting a drive in linux seems easier to me. 
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