Hell yea

You will have to look at the second hand market for sure, but you can probably get a decent 1080p 80-100fps medium/high build.

Something like (or equivalent):

Ryzen 5 3600

RX 6600

16GB DDR4

1TB SSD (probably not NVMe)

Whatever case

Whatever monitor, even if only 60Hz, for now

Whatever MoBo

Tier A PSU from the Cultists Network PSU tier list

You can most likely get everything used if you buy from a second hand shop that has a form of buyer protection (eBay and similar) and thoroughly check and clean and test everything you buy

Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account is being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.

Anyways, I kept them. One drive loss won’t be catastrophic (got two mirrored and also spare backup), so I decided to go for it!

Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account os being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.

In the end I decided to keep them, considering the store provides warranty! Loving the gigantic storage amount I have now haha

Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account os being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.

Anyway, yes, the store I bought them from is a legit store and provides warranty, so I decided to keep the drives!

That’s fair, I paid three times as much though so I do care a bit more haha

Actually, I found something: “DOM: 07JUN2022”. I guess that’s “Date of Manufacturing”?

I was a bit off, they were 15% cheaper than the Ironwolf on the same website/from same seller (156, not USD, vs 179, not USD).

For a better comparison, I went to WD’s official store and for what I spent on these two 8TB Exos (312, not USD) I can get two 4TB Red Plus (310, not USD). Can’t make a direct comparison with other Seagates because their “buy now” section redirects me to Amazon, which, as you said, is not the best since they allowed third party sellers, but on there the 8TB Ironwolf is 250 (!!).

As you already know, I’m not in the US so I can’t buy from there. Unfortunately, Seagate’s “buy now” section (which should be official retailers) brings me to either Amazon or other chains that don’t have much else besides portable drives.

At this point I have two options, really: try again the same online store (which is kinda like Amazon, many third party sellers), but getting Ironwolf, which should be more likely to be “legit”, and of course check them as well when they arrive, or settle for two 4TB WD Red Plus (which isn’t ideal as I’m already nearing 2.5TB total, but should allow me to get by a while longer) bought directly from WD.

edit: looking at the link you provided, I paid 30% less for my Exos. Would that sway you towards keeping it without warranty (apart from the seller’s, which is one year I think)? Mind that I don’t need enterprise-grade drives, and I think even NAS drives are overkill for my needs. For example a WD Blue with its 55TBW per year might be enough for me (that’s 150GB a day everyday for a year, which is above my average writes), but those don’t come big enough (I need 6TB min to be comfortable) nevermind, they do come in 8TB size, just at a lower spinning speed (5640rpm), but they cost more (267) than the Ironwolf, and are SMR and have 128MB cache. Sounds like a bad deal!

No I don’t, I wrote it in the OP haha unless there’s a way to know it by looking up the S/N. Have to check.

How can you be so sure they’re older? They were sold to me as new and they did come in the usual sealed plastic wrap.

Anyway I don’t think saving some money is worth more than a full warranty, so I’m basically set on returning them and get something else

Agree, I stopped buying Sony games because of that

I feel the pain: began my Linux journey some four months ago, tried Ubuntu first, played with it a bit for a couple days, abandoned it; then tried PoP!_OS, got it up and running, broke it, wiped it; tried again and it finally clicked! I’m now dailying it, and it’s been pretty good so far!

Keep trying without forcing yourself, maybe try different distros depending on what you need!

I saw W11 in action on a different PC and that made me stay on W10. In the meantime, I researched Linux and dipped my toes in it for a while. Just made PoP! _OS my daily driver (installed on my main NVME), with much less pain than I thought, while I moved W10 on a secondary, old and small SSD, only for those games that don’t work in Proton/Wine.

It is a bit difficult to learn everything from scratch, but it’s a small price to pay, to be honest

Since you already got your answer (separate cables are safer), I’m absolutely loving the fit. Gigantic GPU and coolers inside small cases are the bane of my existence. I’m also about to shove a 7900XT into a Meshify C, plus I’m sporting a Dark Rock Pro 4 haha and I really like the way it looks

I’m sorry about your experience! I actually have an IronWolf, a small 2TB one, and it’s been a year without issues. I don’t write big amounts of data daily on it though, so my experience might be different.

Good luck with your replacement though!

Oh, that’s right. Nice catch! I can probably repurpose a 256GB SSD I have, can’t I? Should be enough for OS + utilities

The plan is to get more down the road, this is a starter setup! 4TB are enough for all my data at the moment, and the second drive is for backup; I will add a third drive for redundancy and that should be enough as a starter

edit: forgot to mention that I’m not USA-based, sorry! Wow, US prices are amazing. In my country that one is just a little less expensive, adjusted for capacity (the ones I picked are 4TB and 120, the Barracuda is 8TB and 205)! That’s a bummer haha but thanks for the suggestion! edit: let me check the 4TB though edit2: now that’s better, the 4TB is only 89 compared to 120 needed for the IronWolf

Yeah, the only thing they say is “For Ryzen Series APUs (Cezanne and Renoir), ECC is only supported with PRO CPUs.”. That’s why I didn’t pick a Ryzen with integrated GPU (I can’t find PRO models in my country). 2666 speed is supported, so those RAM I picked should work. Thanks!

Yes, those are cheaper but I also want reliability, so I prefer spending a bit more for the actual storage to get something known to be good!

The ones I picked are part # WD40EFRX, so CMR according to that image you linked. It’s just that PCPP doesn’t call them WD Red Plus, but they are. In the end I think I’ll go with the IronWolf instead, since they’re not that much more expensive, but more loved by the community! Thanks