I was looking at this self-hosting guide and scratching my head in confusion. They say $80 nets you a 4TB HDD. Meanwhile, in my country that costs more like $220+. Yes, for an HDD, not SSD (that would be more like way over $500). I see the guide has been updated this year, so either the US lives in another world or nobody has updated the pricing.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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I haven't bought HDDs in a while, but back in the day you could find deals on stuff like WD My Books on sale and just shuck them.
I see some WD Elements external HDDs and they seem to be cheaper than internal HDDs. I don't know if they're worth it, though. For example, a 5TB one is about $130.
Some other higher end selfhosters may not approve of them, but I'll tell you that shucked WD externals are mostly what I run on my computers/servers.
Do they have some sort of speed degradation forced by the firmware? I read on Reddit that some of they may have a firmware that slows them down so they will never be as fast as an internal HDD. Did you notice something similar?
Do they have some sort of speed degradation forced by the firmware?
That's a technical level that is beyond my realm of experience. I have not noticed any real world degradation of speed. However, My Book units are usually WD Green SMR consumer grade HDDs or high capacity drives that have lower sustained write performance than desktop CMR drives, so it may impact sustained/random small write workloads, but I have no data to support that either way.