Yes, the longest serving ones I’ve ever owned were from Hitachi. I’ve owned the Deskstar models from 1, 2, and 3TB capacities, which most were purchased as “gen 1” releases. All disks were in operation 24x7. Of them, from memory, looking at my purchase history and notes, are as follows:

• 2x 1TB - one purchased early 2007 on launch, and the other in 2008 - both were replaced with larger capacity disks before they died, probably between 2016-2017.
• 2x 2TB - one purchased in 2011 and the other in 2012 - one died on July 15, 2021, and the other was retired from active service in February 2023 for a Seagate Exos X18 18TB. The retired disk was used from May 2012 to February 2023 for mapped Windows Libraries and secondary program installations to offload the storage from the SSD boot drive.
• 2x 3TB - both purchased in April 2011 for use in a JBOD configuration with a QNAP TS-212 initially. In 2015, they were migrated to a TS-453A. In February 2018, one of them indicated abnormal sectors and were replaced with newer Seagate 10TB NAS disks in a proper RAID configuration. The non-errored disk was donated in late 2021 to my nephew in-law to use as a storage disk for games where it’s still in use today.

Now for some more gory details that might make some people here uncomfortable.

• !All the disks were purchased in the US initially and used within the US. !<

• !The first 1TB disk purchased in 2007 was used in an external powered HDD enclosure for transporting FRAPS footage and other media related assets back and forth from uni. It was somewhat protected with a padded cushion lining the bottom of my backpack. After it served it’s purpose, it was pulled from the enclosure and added into my tower with the 2nd newly purchased 1TB disk.!<

• !Both the 1TB and 2TB disks were shipped via UPS in the Spring of 2013 from the US to Germany along with my Desktop PC and accessories. The HDD cages with the disks inside were pulled from the NZXT Switch 810 chassis, wrapped in layers of bubble wrap, and packed into the same box as the tower, surrounded by tons of packing peanuts. The chassis got damaged by UPS during the shipment with the left door being too bent to be put back on, however the HDDs were fully functional. !<

• !Both the 3TB HDDs within the TS-212 were wrapped in a Corsair PSU black drawstring bag and placed, feet down, into my Samsonite soft shell carryon bag for my flight to Germany. !<

• !All the disks did a pretty good job under the circumstances including multiple moves within Germany over the next couple years, and while being in use nearly 24x7.!<

For the price point, Kingston DC1500M U.2. Get a dual U.2 to PCI-E x8 adapter for your mirror.

A 3.84TB single disk model should be still just a tad higher than 200 euros.

You’re not asking too much, but you will need a server (or some way to run the software) to actually create some sort of organization, image/object/face recognition processing, etc. that is indexed and can be searched. Depending on what tasks are being run will depend on how much system resources you’ll need or what specific hardware is required to process the files.

Now, does the technology exist there to do what you are looking for without needing to get a server yourself? Yes, it absolutely does. However a lot of it can be found within Media Asset Management systems (not free) that connect to services that do the actual processing (costs extra and really not free). Like, if you wanted to search through your images and find every image with a red coffee cup in it, you could.

This also goes without saying, but if you have a single HDD with all your photos on it, the last thing you should be doing is running high I/O tasks on that HDD if that is your only copy. You should ingest those files into whatever solution you want and process it there, leaving the original intact. Ideally, duplicate that HDD and work off the duplicated data.

Servus! I think I can chime in here since I’m the target demographic that you are looking for.

I just recently bought a bunch of HDDs from Mind Factory this year, where only a single disk bought in February was improperly shipped and DOA. The exchange was fine, however if you are in a hurry, the delay to get a replacement will take a few days to a week since they ship from north Germany.

Concerning sourcing, generally I will always check a site such as https://geizhals.de/ or https://www.heise.de/preisvergleich/ and perpetually hit F5 a few times a day to check for price changes because auto notifications, I found, can be delayed before they are sent.

Concerning pricing, one thing to look for is the historical data of a certain disk you are interested in to see if there are any price drops at a certain time of the month. If there is, and you are not in a particular hurry to buy disks, just wait for about the same period of time for it to happen again. The lowest I was able to get 6x Seagate Exos X20 20TB disks back in July was at 299 euros each (14.99 euros per TB) by just waiting because the normal price per disk was 320 euros. This is really helpful when buying a bunch of disks at once because, hey, I like to save 120 euros when I can if all I have to do is wait a week or so for the price to drop again.

Happy hoarding!