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.
Edit2: luckily reseating power and sata cables appear to have fixed it for now. the drive is resilvering, so hopefully I’m good. Thanks everyone for the recommendations, as I know one will fail at some point.
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I’ve bought about 16 drives from goharddrive (through eBay). Most of them 5+ years ago without any failures. So I can’t say how well they honor their warranty, but they have been around for some time so that is probably a good sign.
If you are running your power supply near its limit I have seen that cause drive drops as well. If you continue to see drives drop that seem to be functional and cables/HBA don’t seem to be the cause, you might want to swap/upgrade power supplies if you can.
Thanks for this. I do have 1 from them that i believe is under warranty for another year.
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!
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!
Any Canadian recommendations??
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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It wasn’t that long ago that it was generally accepted that you shouldn’t buy secondhand/refurbished drives. The world seems to have turned upside down.
Businesses replace drives and systems on a schedule regardless of true wear on them - their risk vs cost metric is very different than ours.
So used business hardware is a great value for those of us who have a sunk cost in labor/expertise.
Most drives I’ve owned have run for 10+ years, while any business won’t run them past 5. I can take the risk of losing a drive, while it’s more important for a business to prevent losing a drive. Business disruption is a more costly event.
I wouldn’t buy SATA drives second hand, but I’ve had second hand SAS drives in my server for nearly 8 years running as a ZFS pool without a problem.
consumer grade vs Enterprise grade. the letter are meant to run non-stop and are often just discarded due to upgrade, not due to problems.
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
