Did decide to go the used drive route just saving up and waiting for the right deal from a good seller. I did notice on eBay specifically that some sellers have tested drives for a great price per tb with a shit seller’s warranty (30 days to 1 year) but offer insurance for a significantly longer length of time for a few more bucks. I’m wondering if that’s a good alternative to having a long seller’s warranty? Just assume I will back everything up properly so drive failure won’t be a massive concern I just want the option of returning it or getting a replacement if need be.

  • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    If you “RAID and backup enough” any chepo used hard drive is a good and valid. :)

    Generally speaking datacenter drives with manufacturer warranty will be a good option because they’re easy to get replaced by the manufacturer without much fuzz. For any second hard drive I look at bad blocks > count of starts > time they’ve been running and if it isn’t an absurd number they should be fine.

    • NuXCOM_90PercentEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

      Yes and no.

      If you put the effort in to get a wide range of sources/batches AND monitor your disks regularly: Agreed

      But if you get a few from the same manufacturing batch/source? Then there are shockingly decent odds that they will fail at roughly the same time. Which is a huge problem if you aren’t monitoring your disks and able to “recover” from however many failures before they take down the array.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        I completely agree with you, no discussion there. Active monitoring is required. Backup in 3-2-1 would solve the same source batch issue. Some backups should be kept spun down / cold storage so the likelihood of failure at the same time is close to none. Still I would mix the production and backups HDDs to avoid that.

        • NuXCOM_90PercentEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Yeah.

          I guess my general approach in my personal life is that I would rather spend a bit more on some refurbs of server grade hdds from a reputable outlet. Because once I start assuming all of my drives will fail at any moment I need much more hierarchical storage and a lot more replacement drives and so forth. And my actual off site backups are a much smaller subset of my data that is in an encrypted volume in a cloud storage provider’s bucket.

          And in my professional life: You are paying for the warranties and support contracts. If you can’t afford to run your own storage then you should just call Amazon and ask for a good deal.

          • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
            11·
            10 months ago

            And in my professional life: You are paying for the warranties and support contracts. If you can’t afford to run your own storage then you should just call Amazon and ask for a good deal.

            Oh yeah. Or don’t have storage at all, because if you can’t afford it you most likely don’t need it :P