Other [BE/NL/EU] Toshiba 3TB 2,5" 15mm SATA drives for <80€ EDIT: ALL GONE

[Phuncz]

EDIT: As of around the 5th of September 2020 the stock dried up. In the end they sold for 75€ a piece, I bought an additional two as cold spares.

I've purchased a bunch of these for my server build and this is still in my watch list, the price has gone down even more.

https://www.sicomputers.nl/toshiba-...de-schijf-2-5-3000-gb-sata-iii-id-514820.html

When I look at another shop selling this hard to get drive, the most likely same distributor seems to have over 500 at the time of this post.

Why are these noteworthy ?

Toshiba 2,5" 3TB 5400rpm SATA (link)
This was the toughest part. Recently it has become known that a lot of HDDs are SMR based, which you don't want for storage that involves random writes. I'm going to be using ZFS and SMR is discouraged for that use. The largest 2,5" HDDs I could find are 2TB drives, which later turned out to be SMR-based as well. The only 1TB+ drives that aren't and also aren't enterprise 10.000rpm (needing cooling, making lots of noise), are the Toshiba MQ03ABB300, which are hard to come by. But they were available in my region and still are for about 100€ a piece. Much cheaper than SSDs and not much more expensive than SMR drives.

At less than 80€ a piece, this 0,03€ per GB drive is now on the heels of the SMR drives' price but without the SMR penalty. Be sure that your case supports 15mm drives as these are thicc bois. These have been running in my server for about a month flawlessly, performance is hard to tell for me as it is used in a ZFS platform in a RAID-Z2 configuration. But I've gotten over 300MB/sec of actual write speed out of 6 in RAID-Z2, which in my opinion is quite good for 2,5" 5400rpm drives in this configuration (not 6x single drive performance).

 

[robbee]

This is tempting! But since I switched over to SSD storage only, I can't stand the clicking noise of a working HDD anymore