Prices have soared recently because AI eats storage as well as GPU; but tracking the data hoarder sites can be worthwhile. Seagate sometimes has decent prices on new.

> Seagate sometimes has decent prices on new.

Make sure to check the "annual powered-on hours" entry in the spec sheet though, sometimes it can be significantly less than ~8766 hours.

Probably a good time to mention systemd automount. This will auto mount and unmount drives as needed. You save on your energy bill but the trade off is that first read takes longer as drives need to mount.

You need 2 files, the mount file and the automount file. Keep this or something similar as a skeleton file somewhere and copy over as needed

  # /etc/systemd/system/full-path-drive-name.mount
  [Unit]
  Description=Some description of drive to mount
  Documentation=man:systemd-mount(5) man:systemd.mount(5)

  [Mount]
  # Find with `lsblk -f`
  What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/1abc234d-5efg-hi6j-k7lm-no8p9qrs0ruv
  # See file naming scheme
  Where=/full/path/drive/name
  # https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/storage_administration_guide/sect-using_the_mount_command-mounting-options#sect-Using_the_mount_Command-Mounting-Options
  Options=defaults,noatime
  # Fails if mounting takes longer than this (change as appropriate)
  TimeoutSec=1m

  [Install]
  # Defines when to load drive in bootup. See `man systemd.special`
  WantedBy=multi-user.target


  # /etc/systemd/system/full-path-drive-name.automount
  [Unit]
  Description=Automount system to complement systemd mount file
  Documentation=man:systemd.automount(5)
  Conflicts=umount.target
  Before=umount.target

  [Automount]
  Where=/full/path/drive/name
  # If not accessed for 15 minutes drive will spin down (change as appropriate)
  TimeoutIdleSec=15min

  [Install]
  WantedBy=local-fs.target

Late reply but this gave me a chuckle as a (I guess old) unix guy. Sun had automount in the late 80s and afaik it/autofs/auto.master stuff is largely unchanged (in usage, maybe not in implementation).