Yes, THREW. I heard a thud as it hit my door and it was loud enough to get my dog barking.
Thanks delivery person, very cool. I hope that when someone else is delivering your expensive fragile items, they're gentle with it so you don't have to go through the anxiety of not knowing whether the hard drive you bought SPECIFICALLY as a long term offline backup might be damaged and unreliable before a single file has been backed up to it.
Like, if it was straight up broken after this, that would be preferable because if it breaks in a year or so, not only do you lose your data (potentially finding out only after your server's main drive also broke and you're trying to recover from your backup), and the website won't refund you because they won't believe that it broke because the person who delivered it mishandled it.
So again, thank you delivery person for making my digital life that much spicier for no reason. Hope you enjoyed those extra two seconds you saved knowing it's not your hard drive or data. Also thank you for not even ringing my doorbell presumably because you didn't want to be confronted by the new owner of the product you potentially broke. Or maybe you wanted to give the package thieves a fair chance at getting it before I did.
Incidentally, does anyone know how I can check the drive for potential damage? I'm currently doing a SMART long test which says it will take over 24 hours. How good is SMART at detecting physical damage as opposed to the drive aging?
Depends how much storage you're looking to get. https://diskprices.com/
Looking at new only, you can get a 3TB drive for $36 on Amazon. 3 of those for $108, 6TB storage with n-1 redundancy. Add $36 for 3TB as many times as your controller will allow (or 4, that's all they have in stock lol).
diskprices.com also has variants for European and other Amazon. Or you could check other retailers. Also the "used" drives are very cheap - these are typically refurbished datacentre drives. They'll have a shorter lifespan, but that's still probably better than a single drive with no redundancy.
This kind of thing is worth spending money on. Otherwise your backup solution isn't really a good backup solution, if you're worried about it failing.
Edit: Also it isn't complicated to set up at all. RAID 5 has slightly more setup, but RAID 1, 0 & 10 are widely available natively in most motherboards, and have been for decades. If you're already setting up some external backup device, it really isn't much extra, for a good payoff.
No, I understand, I have a 28tb (3x14) and a 16tb (3x8tb) array for homelab stuff, and I also imaged my movies to them and serve them up on jellyfin. I'm just also aware that something that would be trivial for me may be an impossible wall for someone else, so if I am not sure of the competence and capability of the person I'm talking to I try to cache my response gently.
I get what you're saying, I just disagree and think it isn't as inaccessible as you make out, or as people who aren't sure about it may feel. It's obviously a bit more than, like, 21st century hand holding software that hides all the options, but it's within the capability of anyone who can make it through a Windows install.
Big up the Jellyfin RAID! I had a bunch of disks in JBOD for too long hah, but that was just out of laziness.