The best hard drives??

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 02:54:27PM +0100, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> Five MyBooks bought 18 months ago had debranded He8 disks in there: very nice.
>> The three Elements a few months back have (non-SMR) WD Reds in them, which is
>> OK. Three more are supposedly turning up tomorrow.
> Oh blast, I wish I had known then...

I've now had time to spin up the server and query all six of these Elements.
They are model number WD80EDAZ-11TA3A0, i.e. 7200RPM air-filled Reds. Since
you'd normally have to get a Red Pro to guarantee that spec, and those are
currently around €260, I'm obviously quite chuffed that I got these for
€115-€135 a pop even if they're not the holy grail of He8s.

I'm getting 1.03GB/s (or 986MiB/s if you have 10.07 fingers) across the six
spindles from copying some random data onto the zpool and then doing a scrub:

  pool: test
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub in progress since Fri Nov 20 22:43:28 2020
        121G scanned at 1.92G/s, 60.7G issued at 986M/s, 121G total
        0B repaired, 50.23% done, 0 days 00:01:02 to go

That's faster than the SSDs used for the boot volume.

>> It also turns out that £1 ≈ €1 ≈ $1.
> Indeed so. Sadly, most Merkins don't know this and wail about not
> understanding Weird Forrin Money.

What's further distorting prices on some things I import from Germany is that
they have a temporary VAT reduction from 19% to 16% due to the plague, but
unsurprisingly this made no difference to the VAT-inclusive prices offered to
consumers. However, the Dutch VAT rate remained at 21% and since I have to pay
the difference when importing so what's actually happened is that Germany has
caused a 3% price increase.

In some cases its actually 5% because some German sellers used to happily
charge the same VAT-inclusive prices to Dutch and German consumers and eat the
2% difference, but 5% is just too much for them to absorb so they charge the
"proper" price.

Since the Czech Republic also has 21% VAT, do you have this experience too?