I found a local shop which sells refurbished and recertified HDDs for a really good price. Some are refurbished, some are recertified, it’s not both at the same time.
Do you have any experience with them? The shop gives a standard one year warranty with them.
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Ask HOW they are “refurbished”. If they’re swapping controller boards or wiping SMART status, pass.
1/3 of my refurbished drives died early. It tested fine before I put it in my raid array, but about 3 months in I was getting error after error. I swapped it with my spare and they’ve been fine so far.
I recommend getting familiar with SMART and understanding what the various attributes mean and how they affect a drive’s performance and reliability. You may need to install smartmontools to interact with SMART, though some Linux distributions include this by default.
Some problems reported by SMART are not a big deal at low rates (like Soft Read Errors) but enterprise organizations will replace them anyway. Sometimes drives are simply replaced at a certain number of Power-On Hours, regardless of condition. Some problems are survivable if they’re static, like Uncorrectable Sector Count - every drive has some overhead of extra sectors for internal redundancy, so one bad sector isn’t a big deal , but if the number is increasing over time then you have a problem and should replace the drive immediately.
Also keep in mind, hard drives are consumables. Mirroring and failovers are a must if your data is important. New drives fail too. There’s nothing wrong with buying used if you’re comfortable with drive’s condition.
I would like to add anecdotally that all of my server drives are second hand and run very well. I’ve only ever had one issue in tens of drives. I think it’s worth it if you can get them for around 3-5$ PT. I have more than one server and everything is backed up.
If it’s much more I would just get them at the highly recommended serverpartsdeals (right?) site.
What is PT?
per terabyte.
I’m using 4 refurbished drives in my server. My first one is showing early signs of failing after three years of being my main torrenting/plex drive.
The other three are new (to me) and are an upgrade from the failing one.
I’d say if the prices are decent, and it includes a year warranty, it doesn’t sound like a bad deal. Just make sure to back it up.
I’ve used plenty of them with no problems for years. Just so long as you have redundancy in place like a good RAID setup there’s little risk of losing anything.
Lots of places play loosely with the terminology, but in general:
Refurbished: they wipes the dust off
Recertified: had an issue, was sent back to manufacturer who fixed it and checked everything else.
Past advice was always buy new, but drives last much longer than they used to. And lots of business replace to be safe when a drive could last another decade just fine.
Yes I have and it’s good, but I don’t think anecdotal evidence matters. I may have been lucky or you might be unlucky.
Personally I always buy multiple refurbished drives and put them in a raid in such a way that they can fail without fucking me over. For a minimal setup, mirror and throw big fat errors with sound when one is down or has smart errors or bad blocks.
