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this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Lots of good advice here. I've got a bunch of older WD Reds still in service (from before the SMR BS). I've also had good luck shucking drives from external enclosures as well as decommissioned enterprise drives. If you go that route, depending on your enclosure or power supply in these scenarios you may run into issues with a live 3.3V SATA power pin causing drives to reboot. I've never had this issue on mine but it can be fixed with a little kapton tape or a modified SATA adapter. It's definitely cheaper to shuck or get used enterprise for capacity! I'm running at least a dozen shucked drives right now and they've been great for my needs.
Also, if you start reaching the point of going beyond the ports available on your motherboard, do yourself a favor and get a quality HBA card flashed in IT mode to connect your drives. The cheapo 4 port cards I originally tried would have random dropouts in Unraid from time to time. Once I got a good HBA it's been smooth sailing. It needs to be in IT mode to prevent hardware raid from kicking in so that Unraid can see the individual identifiers of the disks. You can flash it yourself or use an eBay seller like ThArtOfServer who will preflash them to IT mode.
Finally, be aware that expanding your array is a slippery slope. You start with 3 or 4 drives and next thing you know you have a rack and 15+ drive array.
On the power disable feature topic, I've only bought a few used enterprise drives from Goharddrive.com and Serverpartsdeals.com, but they both included a handy little SATA power adapter with each drive for exactly that reason.
The first desktop I installed them in worked just fine with the factory PSU cables, but when I upgraded I was left scratching my head for a few minutes until I remembered those adapters!
I bought a small roll of kapton tape years ago and just use a sliver of it to cover the 3v3 pin.
Thanks for all the input and feedback - really appriciate it :) I still have quite the way to go to learn some of what these terms are. I have one PCI-e card for expanding the amount of Sata ports, wether is a cheapo card or not im not entierly sure(got it secondhand via a package deal), but have been using it for half a year now without any issues :)