I’ve had a hard drive throw a fault on my truenas zfs pool, so probably need to buy a replacement. I know about serverpartdeals, but seem to recall another fairly cheap refurb hard drive seller when I bought these 4 years ago. I just don’t remember the name. What retailers are you using for hard drives these days if you have a failure?
In the US btw.
I’ll also try just reseating cables in a bit once the scrub finishes. (just in case that’s all it is)
ETA: the other retailer is goharddrive.com. I’m still interested to hear other suggestions if anyone has them.
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I buy all of mine used from random people via ebay. I’ve had a few DOA, and a few start throwing errors after a few years. No issues getting replacements or refunds from sellers within the warranty period. Never had one outright fail, nor have I lost any data from this.
I just checked and it turns out two of my drives are over 95,000 hours, that’s nearly 11 years! And they’re still going strong with no errors!
fairly cheap refurb hard drive seller
Rant:
As a private person, you should avoid refurbished hard drives like the pest!
Imagine buying a used car where the mileage counter has been reset to zero and the vehicle identification number has been tampered with, so that you cannot find out it’s history. You see that it looks shiny and you know that it has been checked (well, somewhat), but you don’t know that checklist. You even know that nobody knows that checklist.
Seriously, you can only assume the worst about this used hard drive’s real condition (years of usage, highest temperature, number of bad sectors…), and also about this reseller.
Refurbished hard drives can only be bought by data centers (or other mass users), where their failure rate is calculated by statistics, but not by 5 or 20 failed drives.
this is true, refurb drives should be avoided unless it’s a very good deal. used drives are fine as long as the conditions are clear.
I have nothing to contribute; I’m scared of used drives. Interested to hear who folks have had good luck with though.
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.
ETA: I think I’ll change my title to refurbished.
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.
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.
You should have e a backup after all
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.
I have had luck with this ebay store…hoping this doesn’t blow up too much as the prices are still pretty reasonable. But just to note, these are used drives with 20K+ hours on them…SMART data provided for every drive sold. Good luck!