The Amazon.de “Black Friday Week” price of the tracked disk is 306.99 EUR. So basically back to the price of 2 month ago before the extreme price hike. No “deal”, just people who had to buy during the last 2 months go to pay a lot extra on top of it.

Dunno how the “Easystores” match of with the “Elements” or what the exact difference is, but 199 USD at least sounds like a deal. :)

With a single disk probably impossible.

But if you have the same HDD already and know it works reliable for some time then you could compare (run them in an open USB case or something during that). Also a good idea to gently touch them, so you can ‘feel’ the respective vibration patterns (good idea to wear an anti-static arm band thingy).

If the new disk —after some “warming up time” (e.g. after it has run for about a week. Use that time to do the zeroing out and SMART long test!)— is much louder, makes unusual clunky noises, scratching noises, high frequent peeps, or other strange sounds much worse than your old disk then may be worth exchanging it as precaution.

Basic mechanical tests are done during the SMART tests (e.g. if you run a short test you’ll hear).

18 TB disks are still the sweet spot price wise it seems. So I would go for that as many as you can afford. The rest depends on what you actually want to do with the NAS. IMHO, you don’t need insane amounts of cache, if the NAS shall just serve some media files. The HDDs itself will be plenty of fine. Just one SSD for the system installation should be all you need, IMHO.

I’m on a Mac. Actually never had to reinstall my OS (usually install once when the computer is new). I still keep my actual data separate from the system installation disk/ device. It’s just the smart thing to do.

But maybe I’m too old-school… back in the Amiga days we had a write-protected system floppy disk (aka the “Workbench” boot disk) and then we kept our actual data on some other (writable) floppy disks. I moved that mentally over. Now I shuffle hard disk drives instead floppies, but the concept is basically the same. :)

If out of other options just do a simply zero format (e.g. diskutil zeroDisk diskX on macOS), and a long SMART test afterwards (e.g. smartctl -t long diskX). That’s what I do with my new disks and it served me well so far. For large capacity disks it is like a heavy 2 day process (1 day formatting, 1 day testing), but it gives me a piece of mind afterwards.

Extra Hint: During any SMART long test make sure to disable disk sleep in your OS for the time, else test will abort (e.g. caffeinate -m on macOS). Also avoid crappy external enclosures that put the disks to sleep by themselves (or you may want to run a script that regularly reads a block from the disk to keep it awake.)

Here’s my macOS script to handle the job (I needed it recently because a temporary crappy USB enclosure). It reads a block every 2 minutes via raw I/O w/o caching involved (“/dev/rdisk”)

#!/bin/bash
# $Id: keepdiskawake 64 2023-10-29 01:55:56Z tokai $

if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
	echo "keepdiskawake: required argument required (disk identifier, volume name, or volume path)." 1>&2
	exit 1
fi

MY_DISKID=`diskutil info "${1}" | awk '/Device Identifier:/ {print $3}'`

if [[ ! -z "${MY_DISKID-}" ]]; then
	printf '\033[35mPoking disk \033[1m"%s"\033[22m with identifier \033[1m"%s"\033[22m…\033[0m\n' "${MY_DISKNAME}" "${MY_DISKID}"
	MY_RDISKID="/dev/r${MY_DISKID}"
	echo "CTRL-C to quit"
	while true; do
		echo -n .
		dd if="${MY_RDISKID}" of="/dev/null" count=1 2>/dev/null
		sleep 120
	done
else
	echo "keepdiskawake: Couldn't determine disk identifier for \"${1}\"." 1>&2
	exit 1
fi

I similarly look for a solution to that. Something where I simply can get an RSS feed for each show I want to track would be perfect (similar like tvkingdom.jp for Japanese TV shows).

I used to have a widget for the old OS X Dashboard once upon a time (the Dashboard, the widget, and the site/service it was using… all R.I.P.) that did the job for me. Yikes, I miss that!

If you improperly eject a disk while the filesystem is in a flux state it doesn’t matter which disk you use you’re very likely encounter that issue again. More so with some filesystems than others. APFS is for some reason worse in this regard, so best stick with the traditional “HFS+ w/ Journaling” on a Mac.

If you transfer large collections of data you could/ probably should use rsync and not the Finder, preferably in a screen or tmux session. That way any crash of any of any the UI components will not mess up the copy process (even if Terminal.app goes down you’ll be able to reconnect to the screen/tmux session with the copy process still doing its thing). Also make sure your external disk has proper power all the time during the process (preferably do not attach another device during that time.)

May help to get you down that rabbit hole for further research: https://www.newsgroupreviews.com/par-files.html