Submitted 8 hours ago by immobile7801@piefed.social to selfhosted@lemmy.world
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 used 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?
I’ll also try just reseating cables in a bit once the scrub finishes. (just in case that’s all it is)
I have nothing to contribute; I’m scared of used drives. Interested to hear who folks have had good luck with though.
Bought 4x10TB drives 2 years ago for 385€ on eBay, from a 20+ years old seller account with tens of thousands of good reviews with a long warranty on drives, to build a local media server + some other services for family and friends.
One was dead on arrival: they just sent me another one, no question asked.
I have them set-up in a RAIDZ1 array, so I can have one disk down and still have the system up.
I have my services and critical data backed up daily (with about twenty snapshots that go back to months before) with Restic to both a Hetzner storage box and a local external drive (both tested for recovery).
I have one disk that failed me a few months ago: sent the disk to the seller, they tested it, and sent me a new 12TB drive because they didn’t have 10TB anymore.
Added it to my ZFS pool, and since then, everything is ok. My few users didn’t even notice anything going on: downtime was minimal, performance was ok.
If more than one disk fails, I have my data on my external drive. If my external drive fails, I can download everything from Hetzner. In both situations, I wait for new drives, replace the old ones in the pool, and restore my snapshots. The downtime is annoying, but I’m not running a business so nobody is paying for anything, so it’s ok.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also, it depends on the problem you are trying to solve and if the good deal lets you buy plenty of spare drives.
I have a 3 server cluster running 9 k8s nodes with persistent storage in Longhorn. While it thrashes the drives a bit more and I lose performance, I opted to use hardware RAID so a drive rebuild would be much easier. (I think with Ceph, it’s a step or two more to kick a drive out of the storage pool before you can swap the drive safely. The fact that I can’t remember much about Ceph already and it’s only been a month or two since I setup a Ceph testing cluster should alone explain my decision.)
Basically, I get volume replication backed by easy to manage and affordable drive replacements. I even get mirrored boot drives too. The setup is fault tolerant to a degree and it gives me enough time to shuffle things around if a server starts to die completely.
All the drives are used and have already had a full life, but yey, the risk is ok because the parts are cheap. I’ll probably buy another refurbished server of the same type just for the spare parts, drives and memory. I could even just use the extra server as a cold standby. Whatevers.
The cluster isn’t critical, to be perfectly honest. It really just holds a massive tool suite of containers that I need at random times and now I at least have solid templates and ansible confogs for all of those containers anyway. Even the data isn’t super critical.
Parts are cheap and my setup allows for disposable drives in a setup where risk tolerance is sky-high.
My NAS is RAID 10 with brand-new drives and read/write cycles are conserved. I care about that data and will probably mirror that storage that to an additional pair of mirrored m.2’s to absorb most of the read a cycles while adding an additional redundancy layer. (The hdds would primarily only see write cycles and probably just function as an incremental backup location for specific folders off of the m.2’s.)
Those are the cliff notes, and only I attempted to explain how I thought about risk in my setup. Volume over quality for my cluster: I think about fast recovery and how I can parch around a problem during a catastrophic failure. Long term: Multiple layers of redundancy for important data with less concern about price but I have less capacity and speed.
Having spent years around lots of equipment, I view a flashy red light on an HDD as a suggestion to do something about it in a couple of days if the server is just a worker node. (I have been desensitized to most hardware faults, TBH.)
I would agree from random sellers. However serverpartdeals is a pretty known reseller and typically offers a warranty. They also list their testing methods on their website.
Would you be satisfied if all your refurb drives live only for the duration of this warranty?
I wouldn’t. Especially as a private buyer (or a small business) I would expect that most of them must live much longer than that.
I have several dozen TB of serverpartdeals darddrives. Us based seller. They are extremely professional and prompt and their packaging was incredible.
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!
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.
justme@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 minutes ago
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.
iamnotme@feddit.uk 1 hour ago
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.