So 10€ for a Terrabyte? How? You can't compare mass-discounted stuff, like cloud, which additionally uses your data for tracking etc., to generate more money, with the consumer focused, single-item storage common a few years ago.
Haven't heard of the brand (MDD), but here's the Amazon listing. It claims to have a 5-year warranty, so there's that, but people on Reddit claim they're basically refurbished HDDs w/ wiped SMART data, so YMMV.
I wouldn't gamble on it and would instead get a brand I trust (either WD or Seagate), but it exists.
Cool. My older RAID controller maxes out at 16TB per drive so that wouldn't work for me either way but I did gamble on some rebranded SAS drives from Amazon once and haven't regretted it. Water Panther was the name, recertified WD Enterprise drives I believe. That was over five years ago and they're all still running strong. The shucked Seagates that I bought brand new all self destructed in a matter of months but, to be fair, they were garbage SMR drives that were never meant to leave the safety of their USB enclosures. They do still work but the write throughput is now somewhere between DSL and dialup...
Basically because it's a redundant server I don't really care about that only rarely gets fired up these days, and I have a second, identical controller for exactly the scenario you're imagining.
But really because I'm lazy and depressed and don't have the energy to take on learning something new (to me) like Unraid at this point. The same server does actually run software RAID for all the VMs' solid state boot volumes, just not for the mechanical drives that store content which is all replaceable anyway as it's freely available on Usenet.
Also, this is a personal system. I take much better care of my customers because I am deeply grateful for my 10 hour-per-week "full time" salaried job that I'm incredibly lucky to have in the first place and am currently doing from bed with my dogs right next to me. Well, I will be anyway after I hit submit.
Often has exorbitant shipping + tax to germany, unfortunately, and once you want recertified ones, so more than a month or so of warranty, it's more expensive.
16 TB @ 200€ with [probably] cheap shipping + you can add an extended warranty of up to 4 years for an additional 6€. No clue whether the extended warranty covers hard drive failure, though it seems like it should.
I agree that cloud storage is a rental scheme and not comparable, but an old sata disk here is 240Gb for £24 which is equivalent to 10c per Gig. If you go back to abandoned formats like ide hard disks you may be able to get 0.01 per Gb.
If we're gonna get nitpicky on this (which we might as well), we should include the cost of bandwidth when talking about the cloud. They offer the storage for free (theoretically), but it still costs you money to upload and download that data.
I was just having a similar conversation with some people about the rapidly increasing size demands from video games, and somebody brought up the point of bandwidth as an issue as important as the size on disk. If you have to download multi-gig patches for a 100+ gig game, that's going to very quickly eat through monthly data caps.