I recommend people to investigate used enterprise storage.

If it passes badblocks & SMART checking (don't rely on that too much, manufacturers do silly things), it is likely to work just fine, and depending on one's location it is possible to acquire triple-redundant 10TB for less than buying a single 10TB drive new would cost.

Unfortunately, you're pretty much out of luck.

The used ones are not a good idea (despite looking cheaper), they're often messed up in a number of ways. 😿

If you ever get to the point of thinking about multi-drive enclosures/cradles though, don't go for USB.

At that point, anything less than SAS (an expander card & breakout cables in an old computer case can do the job quite well) will inevitably prove frustrating through all sorts of annoying issues.

Conventional Hardware & Software RAID has also been exclusively for stuff where you don't care about integrity ever since 520B sectors have stopped being used. (Those 8 additional bytes were for integrity-checking features.)

Now, such features are implemented instead in modern filesystems since awareness of the data structuring is necessary for sane & reliable recovery (conventional RAID assumes that the drive firmware will both detect *and* notify of errors, which is incredibly optimistic in a setting where general pessimism is the sane attitude).

@lispi314 @brouhaha

1. TIL about 520/528B drives. According to one forum post they might even go back to the 70s ("someone on the Internet said it, it must be true!")

2. Integrity checking features? You mean extra space for higher-level checks besides the (40 or so) extra error correction bits used to protect the 512 bytes of data?

I.e. the wrong data could be correctly written to disk. ECC won't catch that during a read, but the extra 8 bytes could.