Comment on Buy HDD on sale now or wait for Black Friday?
jws_shadotak@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Honestly I’d recommend buying refurbished drives and using them in a RAID array so that you can easily replace one for cheap(ish) if it goes bad.
before anyone says “RAID is not a backup” yeah I know but you can’t deny its capability to function as such. 3-2-1 always applies, but bulk storage is half price if buying refurbished.
serverpartdeals.com
to be fair, the drive in question is a NAS drive, which is not a backup drive by its intended default usecase, unless you slapped it in a nas thats stored as a cloud storage in an offsite location.
its just a matter of people understanding that data redundancy is not a backup, just a level of data safeguard, as it only partially covers some of the forms of data loss and not all of them (e.g not immune to physical methods of data loss like fires, floods and stuff)
RAID is carrying a spare tire in your car. Backups are like having an extra car in the garage in case your primary geta totaled.
It’s possible you’ll never need either one, but if you pop a flat, a whole extra car is overkill.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, since most people don’t have a spare car.
Most people don't have a RAID to fall back on either, and I would argue most cars' donuts or spares haven't been checked since the car was new so I think it holds up better than you're giving it credit for lol
As someone who has worked in the it industry doing server work for 20+ years, definitely cannot agree with used drives. Always buy new if you can. Refurb drives are a huge risk whether or not they could have subsequent issues after being repaired. If you value your data, do not buy refurbs.
I used to think that way too, then realized, who gives a fuk if using 321 backup method and have a cheaper spare on hand doesnt matter. Also this isnt enterprise, where i wouldnt even think about getting used.
Serverpartdeals is very reputable seller of refurb drives with low usage. Buy few in size you qant put them in a zfs or raid1 and move on with your life. However just make sure you have error chexking and drive tests on to find faulty drives and alerts you have tested working before you set it and forget it.
You can buy twice as many drives, though.
well…its a hit or miss, i recently just got lucky with 2 16tb drives i got for 400, it probably came from a chinese chia server or some shit idk, but i did basic checks like SMART and they seem fine. I had my rx580 years ago also probably from a mining data center.
My logic and xp with these used “enterprise” stuff is that they are definitely used but not as abused like being OCed, etc. because they are optimized to run for a long time unless they are being decomissioned.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Value the redundancy, make backups of data that can’t easily be replaced.
Aint that hard to learn.
Can you sleep loosing a movie on your disk?
Can you also sleep loosing an entire photo album on your disk?