Why Build a Storage Server

 You finally ran out of space. The old 4TB drive that used to feel massive is now barely enough to hold your backlog of 4K Blu-ray rips. Add in your Steam backups, a Time Machine partition, and that folder you keep “just in case,” and it’s game over. It’s time to upgrade your storage, and this time you’re not messing around.

Let’s talk about building a proper storage array at home. Whether you’re hoarding movies, running your own Nextcloud, or setting up a game archive, high-capacity storage is the foundation of it all. And if you're anything like me, you're trying to do this without getting robbed by retail markup. The goal is simple: maximum terabytes for the lowest possible cost.

At first, people tend to look at brand new drives from Amazon or Newegg. You search for 12TB or 16TB models and immediately see prices north of $200. That might be fine if you’re buying one drive for a high-end NAS, but when you're trying to build 50TB or more, those prices don’t scale. You’ll burn through your budget before you’ve even finished cabling.

This is where most smart builders turn to the secondhand market. And not just any used drives. I’m talking about the enterprise stuff. Seagate Exos, Western Digital Ultrastar, Toshiba MG series. These were built for servers and datacenters, and they were designed to spin 24/7. When you buy them used, they’ve already been through the fire. Some people get nervous about that, but honestly, they’re some of the most reliable drives out there. As long as the seller shows SMART data and offers returns, you’re golden.

Another killer strategy is shucking external hard drives. Every few months, a retailer like Best Buy or Costco drops the price of a 14TB WD Elements or Seagate Expansion desktop drive. Inside? Often a white-label or even name-brand NAS drive. You pop open the enclosure, pull out the SATA drive, and boom — you’ve got a high-capacity internal drive for 30% less than retail. It’s a bit of a gamble which model you’ll get, but if you're building a JBOD array or using software redundancy, it doesn’t matter all that much.

Of course, you’ve got to think ahead a bit. If you’re planning to build with redundancy, your options include Unraid, TrueNAS, or even just using mergerfs and SnapRAID. These tools let you pool a bunch of mismatched drives and get features like parity protection, automatic file repair, and easier expansion. This setup works beautifully for media libraries, personal backups, and data archiving. And unlike traditional RAID, you don’t need to worry about every drive being the same size or speed.

The best part? None of this requires enterprise money. You can build a 100TB array for less than the cost of a new MacBook if you’re patient and hunt for deals. You just need a way to quickly find the best bang-for-buck hard drives available in real time.

This is where DiscountDiskz earns a mention. Instead of digging through eBay listings manually, trying to figure out the cost per terabyte for every single drive, you can just go to DiscountDiskz and sort by price per TB. You pick your filters, whether that’s minimum capacity, interface type, or even specific brands, and it pulls live listings with the math already done. It doesn’t sell drives — it just helps you buy smarter. For anyone building a NAS, Plex server, or just hoarding terabytes for the apocalypse, it's the simplest way to stretch your storage budget without the guesswork.