Another question about used hard drives

kumatomic, 7 months ago

There’s a lot of good suggestions here, but I just wanted to add that I absolutely wouldn’t rely on a random eBay seller’s warranty in any way. I made that mistake early on in my journey. I came back to find my seller had deleted their account (probably to start another and skip out on warranties).

ShepherdPie, 7 months ago

You might check out serverpartdeals.com. I’d trust a larger company over some random ebay seller. They have warranties oh their drives too. I’ve only bought one from them thus far but haven’t had any issues with the drive.

ponchow8NC, 7 months ago

Really appreciate it they actually also have an eBay store which I’ve been stalking religiously I’m just waiting for a lower capacity drive, 8-10tb is my realistic sweet spot. In the meantime I’m just browsing and looking at other well known sellers.

isles, 7 months ago

I just bought a few 18tb from serverpartsdeals (via eBay) and they’re working well for now. YMMV of course.

TCB13, 7 months ago

If you “RAID and backup enough” any chepo used hard drive is a good and valid. :)

Generally speaking datacenter drives with manufacturer warranty will be a good option because they’re easy to get replaced by the manufacturer without much fuzz. For any second hard drive I look at bad blocks > count of starts > time they’ve been running and if it isn’t an absurd number they should be fine.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 7 months ago

Yes and no.

If you put the effort in to get a wide range of sources/batches AND monitor your disks regularly: Agreed

But if you get a few from the same manufacturing batch/source? Then there are shockingly decent odds that they will fail at roughly the same time. Which is a huge problem if you aren’t monitoring your disks and able to “recover” from however many failures before they take down the array.

TCB13, 7 months ago

I completely agree with you, no discussion there. Active monitoring is required. Backup in 3-2-1 would solve the same source batch issue. Some backups should be kept spun down / cold storage so the likelihood of failure at the same time is close to none. Still I would mix the production and backups HDDs to avoid that.

NuXCOM_90Percent, 7 months ago

Yeah.

I guess my general approach in my personal life is that I would rather spend a bit more on some refurbs of server grade hdds from a reputable outlet. Because once I start assuming all of my drives will fail at any moment I need much more hierarchical storage and a lot more replacement drives and so forth. And my actual off site backups are a much smaller subset of my data that is in an encrypted volume in a cloud storage provider’s bucket.

And in my professional life: You are paying for the warranties and support contracts. If you can’t afford to run your own storage then you should just call Amazon and ask for a good deal.

TCB13, 7 months ago

And in my professional life: You are paying for the warranties and support contracts. If you can’t afford to run your own storage then you should just call Amazon and ask for a good deal.

Oh yeah. Or don’t have storage at all, because if you can’t afford it you most likely don’t need it :P

scottmeme, 7 months ago

I’ve bought plenty of used drives, like 25-30 from eBay alone, only had around 5 SSDs fail after pretty heavy abuse. I’ve also bought refurbished drives, they are really good value from buying brand new ones.

ponchow8NC, 7 months ago

Were they all from the same seller?

scottmeme, 7 months ago

SSDs were from Garland computers (great company and visited locally)

All the refurb drives are water panther from Amazon, but they have a website you can buy from directly. They are RMA drives from Western Digital and Seagate with 0 hours.

originalucifer, 7 months ago

what you want are used datacenter drives that still have some manufacturer warranty left. they sell them all over on amazon too. then you dont have to deal with some middleman when you need a replacement

4grams, 7 months ago

Bingo. I’ve been running refurb 4tb hgst drives for years now, oldest one has 50k power on hours and I’m not sure if that’s how long I’ve run it or if it had a bunch when it came. Either way, I have yet to lose one in years of use while popping several western digital and seagate drives.

I’m moving to 10tb drives (I tend to pick the biggest sub $100 drive option when I need a new standard) since I’m out of drive bays and nearly out of space on the old garbage array. Stick to the 3-2-1 rule and these should be fine.

ponchow8NC, 7 months ago

You reassured me thank you. Was straight up looking at 10tb hgst drives but was hesitant. I’ll still check out other drives that have manufacturer warranties on them but its nice to know I can fall back on my old plan if I don’t find a good deal.

loudWaterEnjoyer, 7 months ago

The 3-2-1 rule can aid in the backup process. It states that there should be at least 3 copies of the data, stored on 2 different types of storage media, and one copy should be kept offsite, in a remote location (this can include cloud storage). 2 or more different media should be used to eliminate data loss due to similar reasons (for example, optical discs may tolerate being underwater while LTO tapes may not, and SSDs cannot fail due to head crashes or damaged spindle motors since they do not have any moving parts, unlike hard drives). An offsite copy protects against fire, theft of physical media (such as tapes or discs) and natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. Physically protected hard drives are an alternative to an offsite copy, but they have limitations like only being able to resist fire for a limited period of time, so an offsite copy still remains as the ideal choice.

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