Or OpenWRT on a thrift store Linksys

The drives you’re seeing with the “too good to be true” pricing are what most people call “white label” drives. From what I understand, it’s either refurbished or something that didn’t pass the big-brand QC so they don’t get the brand name. Slap a white label on it and ship it.

WD, Seagate, Toshiba will all have approximate price parity through various levels of HDDs. You can base your shopping on these prices for first quality drives. I like WD. Currently I’m running zfs raidz2 (one parity drive) on four drives. Two are WD, one Seagate, one Toshiba. No problems yet but this array has only been on for 9 months. Prior to that I had a 2-disk striped raid with 2x 4tb WD blue drives and it ran for 8 years without an error.