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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/V1k1ngC0d3r on 2023-08-08 13:42:52+00:00.

Well, the gods have a sense of humor.

3 days ago, I asked y’all if I could make an okay NAS out of my old desktop, and I bought a copy of Unraid in their Summer Sale, and everything seemed to be going great, so I checked pcpartpicker for HDD prices, and I saw a sale… so like an idiot, I went and bought 4 Seagate Exos X20s. I know. I know. But I was so pleased that I could boot Unraid off of a USB, and then I had 4 SATA ports sitting right there, looking all pretty and unused…

…and then the machine crapped out.

Right in the middle of transferring data from an external HDD I had laying around, trying to learn Unraid and getting to play with Docker for the first time ever (neat!), the machine up and died.

So, I’ve got $1200 of drives coming, and no machine to put them in.

So now I’m looking at my local MicroCenter (an hour away), trying to decide on a Refurbished Optiplex to buy, that I could stuff 4 drives into.

I’m pretty sure I should just cancel the order for the drives. And let myself cool down a bit, and not throw good money after bad.

My friend pointed out, “The exos drives are great, however, Seagate flags all of them as OEM. So buying from Amazon/Newegg… Seagate won’t warranty them if they fail (even if it shows that it is in warranty) and tell you to go back to where you bought it from. Now, I have only had one of 12 fail, and it showed bad sectors after a week, so was able to return it, but the lack of warranty being honored if for personal use is something to keep in mind.”

So yeah, maybe I should have bought those IronWolf drives instead.

Anyway, woe is me…

Is there a good Optiplex (under $400?) that I could just drop those 4 Exos drives into?

The 9020 looks like it has two 5.25" expansion bays and two 3.5" bays?

I hope you enjoy laughing at my plight. (Honestly. Because if I can’t at least make you laugh, then my pain was pointless.)

Maybe I should just buy a cheap Synology, and do all my Docker experiments elsewhere.

Thoughts? Told-you-so’s? Any suggestions on an Optiplex model?