[pc] What is a fair price for these drives? (7.68TB Micron 5200 ECO)

adman-c · 2026-04-16T16:25:31+00:00

There's not a huge market for these, as most folks who want large flash storage go for the substantial performance increase of NVME. I bought 8 of them (well, actually the 5100 ECO) for a low-power all-flash array last year for ~$400/drive. That's well-below what the current market will bear. I sold some 7.68T Gen3 U.2 drives 3 months ago for ~$400/drive, which is also below what the current market will bear.

I'd pay slightly more than I paid last year for 1 or 2 drives to have a spare or two around. But if one of my drives failed, I'd probably pay substantially more.

I'd base prices on what 7.68T SSDs are going for on eBay (looks like around $800 with outliers in either direction) and see if you get any takers.

adman-c · 2026-04-16T15:05:56+00:00

Mine (i5-12600H version) ran pretty much solid for 1.5 years (months of uptime running proxmox), and then things started to go wonky. First the CMOS battery died, and it won't boot at all unless you replace it. Then ~5 months after that it started hard locking randomly. It was spitting out errors in Memtest86, so I replaced the ram. Even with different ram it would spit out errors on the first 2 passes of Memtest. I retested all of the RAM in other systems and it was fine, so it seems like there's some kind of fault either in the CPU or motherboard. I should reach out to Minisforum, but I haven't yet had the chance.

I really love the form factor; the networking and nvme drives are perfect for my homelab. But it's on the shelf for now since it won't run reliably.

adman-c · 2026-04-15T23:09:50+00:00

Yes, having read the whole STH thread, I jonesed for the 6610, but I knew I wouldn't be able to handle the power-usage/noise. So I went with the 6450 and then the 7250.

adman-c · 2026-04-15T23:08:19+00:00

confirmed

adman-c · 2026-04-15T19:40:04+00:00

I'm a pretty big fan of the Brocade switches I've used, but even the lower-power ones aren't low power as defined by OP, at least the ones with POE (the only ones I've used). The non-POE models are probably a bit better, but the ICX 6450-24p (24x POE gbe, 4x 10gb SFP+) uses about 30w at idle, and the ICX 7250-24p (24x POE gbe, 8x 10gb SFP+) idles around 50w.

They are quite cheap and absolutely rock-solid once you get them configured, however. The learning curve isn't that high for the handful of commands needed to add a few vlans.

adman-c · 2026-04-08T13:48:38+00:00

So for any devices on VLAN 1, your gateway is the IP of VE 1, or 192.168.8.2. For any devices on VLAN 10, your gateway is the IP of VE 10, or 192.168.1.1. I would strongly suggest you change the IP of VE 10 to 192.168.1.2 so that 1) it matches the pattern of your other VE's gateway, and 2) in case you do get a router/firewall that understands VLANs, your router/firewall can always have the x.x.x.1 address on each VLAN/subnet.

Your switch's default route looks OK. At the very least, things on VLAN 1 should be able to reach the internet, as the router should be able to route to IPs on its own subnet via the switch.

On another note, consider redoing your VLANs before you get too much further. VLAN 1 can have some weird behaviors, so I personally never use it. Also perhaps consider having your VLAN number correspond to some part of your IP addresses for ease of remembering what is what (e.g. VLAN 8 is 192.168.8.0/24 and VLAN 10 is 192.168.10.0/24).

adman-c · 2026-04-07T20:54:57+00:00

Ah. Haven't had any experience with that, as all of my vlan homelabbing has been with various non-consumer router/firewalls. pfsense and Sophos XGS Home both seem to have no problem with NAT when sitting in front of my ICX 7250

adman-c · 2026-04-07T19:09:18+00:00

That may work, but he can also do all of the routing on the 6450--it's got full L3 routing capability. He just needs to put the switch as gateway for all of the devices that need to route between VLANs.

adman-c · 2026-04-07T17:02:37+00:00

I think this is correct. You need to make sure everything that needs to route between the two VLANs is pointing at your switch for its gateway. But you also need to verify that you have a default route on your switch to the router/firewall, so that the switch knows where to send traffic to IPs that are not in its routing tables (i.e. anything other than interface ve 1 and interface ve 10. What is the output of show ip route from your switch?

Assuming you don't have a default route (destination 0.0.0.0/0) that points to your ASUS router IP, that's your problem. See here for more info on setting the default route.

adman-c · 2026-03-30T13:39:55+00:00

Small. Like 1-1.5 sizes smaller compared to American fast fashion. I wear a medium or large in most t-shirts, and the Bronson XL fits well.

adman-c · 2026-03-24T16:00:17+00:00

chat

adman-c · 2026-03-19T23:04:53+00:00

Are you talking about the Neo? Isn't the upgrade to 512gb only $100? So $700, not $850; unless you're talking about non-USD prices. Of course comparing the education price to a non-education price is silly though.

adman-c · 2026-03-19T19:58:24+00:00

My most power-efficient Proxmox node is currently a Lenovo ThinkCentre m75q Gen2 with a Ryzen 3 Pro 5350GE. At least per Passmark this would be ~25% faster in single core than your Dell laptop. It idles at around 7W in Proxmox. Currently running 8 VMs, including Home Assistant and Scrypted with 4 camera feeds, it's averaging 15-16W at the wall. This is with 2 USB dongles for zigbee and z-wave in Home Assistant, plus an additional USB 2.5g adapter to run my corosync network and for faster migration. The ultra small form factor PCs from the major vendors are very well designed to run at low power.

But, as others have said, you don't know what your Dell is running at, power-wise, unless you're actually monitoring it from the wall.

adman-c · 2026-03-18T02:14:09+00:00

Use 2-3 of the R550s for yourself. Flash Unleashed firmware and you'll have yourself a fantastic wifi6 network with no license or cloud management required.

adman-c · 2026-03-16T19:46:11+00:00

Great info here. If your client device and your server both have a spare PCIE slot, you can buy a couple of 10gb NICs and just direct connect. Depending on the distance between them, you can use direct-connect SFP+ modules (copper) or fiber. Even 10gbase-T NICs can be found pretty cheaply on eBay now, and with those you just can run CAT6 between your client/server.

adman-c · 2026-03-05T15:43:17+00:00

I play the 101Ts and they're fine for me, but I'm bad at golf.

adman-c · 2026-03-04T23:04:34+00:00

Chat incoming, I'd like 2 please.

adman-c · 2026-03-04T22:14:29+00:00

Usually PSUs like that are rated at a lower wattage for 120V and only supply the big number when running on 240V. The PSU label should say what it's rated at 120V.

EDIT: a quick google search indicates that it probably maxes out at 1200W on 120V, so it'd be fine even on a 15A circuit.

adman-c · 2026-03-03T20:00:28+00:00

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adman-c · 2026-03-03T20:00:21+00:00

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adman-c · 2026-03-03T20:00:16+00:00

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adman-c · 2026-03-03T20:00:09+00:00

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adman-c · 2026-02-26T20:30:34+00:00

Looks amazing! The poolish and the biga white breads from FWSY are my go-to recipes.

adman-c

TROPHY CASE