Tell me why i'm silly for buying used drives

LeperousDust

LeperousDust

LeperousDust

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Just bought a few used 2tb SAS drives, nothing mission critical, will be loads of redundancy involved, so now i've just went ahead and done it anyway, does everyone fancy telling me why I shouldn't have done so?

:D
 
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Afraid I can't tell you it's bad as I tend to do the same with HP 2.5" sas drives.

For the price of 1 new 300gb, I can get 4 or 5 refurbed from a broker with warranty, which are absolutely fine for most of our servers (which all run raid 1 or 10 with hot spares).

Generally hard drives follow the typical bathtub curve so generally die quickly or take forever, so buying 1 or 2 year old drive isn't an issue personally (and is maybe beneficial with mixing up different batches, production dates to minimise the chance of 2 failures at the same time etc.)
 
Just spread the disks out to reduce impact of disk failure of single batch drives given bath tub curve failure rates.
 
LizardKing said:
proper SAS? as in not glorified sata drives with the sas interface :)
but as Armageus says, drives tend to fail in the first few months or years later, so if they have a bit of usage its likely no big deal.
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Oh I'm not sure what the difference is, I just have a serverraid M1015 card so thought i'd use it, I haven't really looked into the big differences, as this is purely just I'd like a lot of storage really.

LizardKing said:
And also this? :D
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8 x ST32000444SS £149.99 & free postage on some little known site where you bid for things.

And another 3 Hitachi 1tb drives in that shot for good measure for £19 with free postage, yet to be tested mind, I have too many other things to do right now with work.
 
I recently got 8 2TB 7200RPM Enterprise Class WD drives for £20 a drive inc postage. I run it in a ZRaid2 pool on my FreeNAS box (so 2 failures, like RAID 6 but with parity spread across the drives rather than dedicated drives).

Works a treat, plenty quick, and I got 12TB of usable space, with plenty of resilience and loads of read performance for £160.
 
Ok, so they're here, and I'm ready to put them in my uraid box, whats the best way to stress test them, and make sure theyre all ok, or ditch the bad ones? Either way it's going to take a while, and I want to do it right once...

Windows, or unraid (looks like unraid doesnt support preclear properly anymore) solutions if possible. But nothing stopping me loading up Linux on my main box.

On my windows box its looking like HDTune or HDDScan are the still the options for low level scanning? HDDScan has been marked as discontinued?

//Edit: Ended up going with HDSentinal, its bloody awesome!
 
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Many (many) days later, because i've been busy and testing obviously takes forever.... anyway I have some total gems :)

2 with only 25 days power on time with 5.6 and 23tb of writes resp, including my surface disk reinitialise.
3 with 238 days with 5, 5 and 16tb writes
3 with 2038 days but all only 5.6tb writes

All with 100% passes in pretty much every metric on a full surface reinitialise and test.

Full details here if anyone really (unlikely) cares:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1TPqtH19f9tEQ50NiLDHz_-v6fmvOLV9F
 
"Tell me why i'm silly for buying used drives"

They only thing i have to add is Businesses need to know the real cost for enterprise infrastructure. If you keep doing stuff on the cheap you never get any proper investment/decent kit.
 
Lowest I can find is £49 for a WD RE 2TB drive! You've snatched them all up!

Would you advise buying all 12 drives from the same supplier?
 
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