Comment on used hard drive retailers

Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• immobile7801@piefed.social ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  All 4 of my drives are refurbs from serverpartdeals. They typically come with a 2-3 year SPD replacement warranty. Mine just happened to pass 3 years in April of this year. This is the first failure for me.

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  • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Just a heads up, I pulled the drive stats from Backblaze’s drive survey, for most brands failure rates accelerate at 4-5 years.

    At that point Hitachi, Toshiba, and Seagate all increased in failures. Western Digital didn’t, except for their 2014 batch that immediately dropped off.

    Western Digital post 2020 are the most reliable drives.

    Hitachi, Toshiba and Seagate seem to hit a cliff around 2-5 years now, but that only kills about 10% of their drives, so with replication you’re probably fine, just make sure to mix drives so you don’t get correlated failures.

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    • immobile7801@piefed.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      good to know, thanks

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• NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Used data center drives are great for a home lab. They’re built like tanks for hundreds of thousands of hours of constant operation. Unless you’re running a business hosting a bunch of public-facing websites out of your garage, you don’t have that kind of workload (and if you are doing that you should just be buying new drives anyway and writing them off as a business expense).

  Data center drives get replaced when they hit a ceiling of operating hours, with no actual faults, or if they experience any minor faults (it’s a business expense - drives are consumables - data centers have storage rooms of spares sitting around, they just replace them).

  Any competent reseller should be able to give you a SMART report, and that should tell you if there are any major issues (generally they don’t get resold if there are, nobody will buy them). If the seller won’t give you a SMART report then obviously don’t buy, they’re either a scammer or incompetent.

  If your array redundancy is set up properly then there’s no reason to be “scared” or trust in “good luck”. Assume luck will be bad. Mirror every storage device that has critical/irreplaceable data on it, and have at least one hot standby drive in every pool. Don’t bother with complicated striping schemes to try and scrape a little more storage space out of your drives, that’s dumb. One-to-one mirroring for every drive. Storage drives are consumables. They will fail, not if but when, even if you only buy new. Learn to read a SMART report. Enjoy quality hardware with no real problems at low prices.

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  • B0rax@feddit.org ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    One-to-one mirror for every drive might be excessive… just a 1 or two drive parity system should be fine for most home use cases

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    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Well the “critical/irreplaceable” qualifier is kind of important - that’s why I specified it. It’s up to you to decide what that means for your data and risk tolerance.

      For everything that I consider irreplaceable, I’m not comfortable with anything less than 100% duplication on the live system, and also an external offline backup. Even with enterprise-grade hardware, I don’t trust storage devices, they’re all destined to fail. Storage is the most important part of a data server, and should be treated like it is constantly trying to light itself on fire, like a library with wooden shelves lit with torches. All the other components are just as unreliable, but more expendable.

      Admittedly, when you account for hot standby drives, the cost is that my storage availability is only 40%. A 16TB storage pool is in fact 5x 8TB drives: 2 mirrored pairs and 1 standby. On the plus side, thanks to ZFS and TrueNAS those drives can be whatever, no need to worry about RAID considerations for matched drives. SAS or SATA? who cares? They can even be different speeds, ZFS will compensate. Buy whatever is the right size for the pool, let the system deal with the other issues.

      Can you put a price on stability? longevity? peace of mind?

      The server hardware is all old repurposed stuff - a desktop build from 2013, secondhand data center surplus, refurbished/used drives, none of it’s worth much and almost all of it is well past end of life, any part of it could fail without warning at any moment. It doesn’t matter, it is highly reliable because the redundancies have redundancies, including the boot drives. Trying to squeeze every bit of value out of the hardware is a losing game because it’s basically worthless anyway, but the same would be true if it were all new top-of-the-line gear. The hardware is expendable, the data is not. Buy more cheap hardware, plan for it to explode, learn how to build stable, recoverable systems.

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      • Jason2357@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Its about balancing your priorities for availability with recouverability. A business loses a lot more money than I do over a couple days downtime.

        Mirrored drives are not backup drives, and vice versa. Though ZFS can definitely start to blur the distinction with automated snapshots and especially offsite mirrors.

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• Bluefruit@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  IMO in a raid config, used drives are fine, especially if you have backups.

  I bought a few before the prices were crazy and they havnt been on for a while but never had issues with them. Funny enough, I had more issues with the used motherboard than I did with those drives lol.

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• habitualTartare@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Bought 7 4TB SAS drives for $160. They had about 7 years of runtime with no errors after going through the scripts here: forum.level1techs.com/t/…/249802. I mixed them with some existing 4TB consumer drives and I’m working on automating my 3-2-1 backup (albiet the 1 is still whenever I get around to it).

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• Waryle@jlai.lu ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Bought 4x10TB drives 2 years ago for 385€ on eBay, from a 20+ years old seller account with tens of thousands of good reviews with a long warranty on drives, to build a local media server + some other services for family and friends.

  One was dead on arrival: they just sent me another one, no question asked.

  I have them set-up in a RAIDZ1 array, so I can have one disk down and still have the system up.

  I have my services and critical data backed up daily (with about twenty snapshots that go back to months before) with Restic to both a Hetzner storage box and a local external drive (both tested for recovery).

  I have one disk that failed me a few months ago: sent the disk to the seller, they tested it, and sent me a new 12TB drive because they didn’t have 10TB anymore.

  Added it to my ZFS pool, and since then, everything is ok. My few users didn’t even notice anything going on: downtime was minimal, performance was ok.

  If more than one disk fails, I have my data on my external drive. If my external drive fails, I can download everything from Hetzner. In both situations, I wait for new drives, replace the old ones in the pool, and restore my snapshots. The downtime is annoying, but I’m not running a business so nobody is paying for anything, so it’s ok.

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