I use a few hundred drives as cold storage backup pools and I try to get to them twice a year but I always test them at least once a year. I lose 2-3 drives every year. Since they are mostly smaller 750GB to 4TB drives in 12x driver RAIDz2 pools it is not really that bad and I have never lost data yet.
What are you using for a server and how do you manage it? I need something at least 500+TB, but I’ve yet to find something that’s reasonably cost effective and easy enough for a dumbass like me to manage (hardware more than software).
My average cost per usable TB is around $11 per TB, but most of my drives are smaller used SATA/SAS drives. My main pools come out to about 450TB of usable storage.
Edit, Copy paste from the post I never got around to making.
Main Pools 2023, are on 24/7/365 - 360-420 Watts.
I use 3 UPS units to protect them.
Name | Usable TB | ZFS | vdev | Drives per vdev | Drive size |Estimated total cost|Content|Notes| —|—|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|---- Main | 65.90TB | RAIDz2 | 1 | 8 | 12TB |$960| Content | New drives | Main | 76.50TB | RAIDz2 | 1 | 8 | 14TB |$1200| Content | New drives | Main | 87.86TB | RAIDz2 | 1 | 8 | 16TB |$1120| Content | reconditioned drives | Backup0 | 176.91TB | RAIDz2 | 2 | 12 | 10TB |$1500| Backup | used + new drives | Temp0 | 12TB | EXT4 | 1 | 1 | 12TB |$120| Temp | new drive |
Main pool - 261.26TB, This is all 1 pool, but I broke it up on the list since I use 3 different drive sizes.
Total usable TB : 450.17TB
Total Cost : $4900 / 450.17TB = $10.89 per usable TB, not bad considering the amount of drives were purchased new.