Questions regarding Old-new Hard drives - eviltoast

Hi, I seek your help once again. I’m in the need of upgrading my storage now and I found what I consider to be a good deal via Amazon on an older gen enterprise WD drive that supposedly hasn’t been used, but I’ll let the power on hours tell me the truth. The price is about 16usd/TB and I’m wondering if this is a bad idea due to the age of the drive? I’m guessing the drive would be about 10 years old maybe. The plan would be to buy 2: 1 for my cold media backups and the other would be a backup for the cold media backup.

    • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
      83·
      11 months ago

      $18/TB is a crazy high price. I’ve bought most of all my WD drives new for <$15/TB by waiting for sales on Easystore/Element drives

        • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
          61·
          11 months ago

          Considering this guy is looking to slap some drives into his personal computer in order to store some movies, who gives a shit if they’re enterprise drives or not? I have numerous 6 year old ‘junk’ drives in my server that haven’t given me a single issue the entire time powered on 24/7. It’s not like he’s looking for drives to put in a Facebook datacenter.

        • JGrffn@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          You can get 20tb seagate exos drives for ~$15/tb on ebay, sometimes on Amazon as well.

          • doubletandard@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            11 months ago

            i have 4tb version of exos drive and read error rate is going crazy after more than 2 years running 24/7

            • JGrffn@lemmy.worldEnglish
              4·
              11 months ago

              I’m too retarded to understand SMART values so, I 100% have read errors on them, I have no idea what the numbers mean, though, so I can’t say how bad it is. I don’t see critical failures or unrecoverable errors being reported on them, so I don’t sweat it too much.

              • doubletandard@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                11 months ago

                mine haven’t failed but it failed to mount from time to time. if you have production environment to run consider taking a look at backblaze drive failure report.since i have nothing important on the drive i will keep it running until its final day though

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    11 months ago

    If it’s not been used, there should be no major difference. That’s a big IF though. There’s lots of resellers on NewEgg and Amazon that sell “refurbished” drives with a BS warranty of 30-90 days, after which the drives will more than likely fail. Most of these resellers reset the SMART data to report a drive as passing, or go so far as to swap controller boards to make it seem new. Do your research before buying.

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
      51·
      11 months ago

      Mechanics doesn’t like just sitting around. 10 years is not nothing, I’d definitely take that into account.

    • poncho@lemmynsfw.comOPEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Might be stupid to ask but how would you go about weeding out the bad sellers from the good ones when it comes to hard drives? Especially on secondhand markets like eBay and amazon

      • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Don’t use Amazon or Ebay, use something like serverpartdeals.com so you know you’re not buying from some fly-by-night company that’ll disappear when you try to do a warranty claim.

        • Nyarlathotep@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          I just placed my first order with them a couple of days ago. It looks like a great source, and there are lots of happy users.

          • CmdrShepard@lemmy.oneEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            I bought my last 14TB drive with them after buying new ones over the last 6 years. I definitely wish I would have heard about them sooner as I could have a lot more storage at a lot lower price if I had.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Reviews, mostly. Don’t buy from new accounts without older AND recent reviews. If this is supposed to be a new product, check the warranty on the drive with the manufacturer before hooking it up, and if something seems fishy, send it right back for a refund. That’s about all I got.