I'm glad to announce that I'm finally one of you guys :)
I managed to get a 12TB HDD at what I consider a great deal ($55).
The "bad news", it's a SAS drive so I had to buy a controller (9306-24i, I'm not sure how good it is but I get it from the same guy for $50) and I guess that means I'll be picking up more SAS drives in the future.
The drive has ~51k with like 13 cycles and I've already done a sanitization + a low level format to set the block size to 4K, rn I'm running a long SMART test... the second one bc I lost power during the first one when there were like 3 hours left to finish it :)))
It's supposed to be free of bad sectors and I plan to use it only for multimedia and data I don't mind losing, so hopefully it'll last a few more years because the used market rn is a pain and the fact that I'm currently unemployed it's not the best combo lol