Any reason these renewed drives from Amazon would be a bad choice? Planning on getting 4 of them to build a NAS and maybe hosting jellyfin.

  • GhettoDuk@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I’ve bought a couple of refurbs off Amazon before. It’s pretty much what you expect. Cheap, but they are not going to last long. I never used them in anything less than a RAID 6 setup, and they were the first drives to fail and be replaced. They can get you over the hump of having to order a whole set of new drives at once, but you shouldn’t use more than a few and start replacing them as soon as you can because they may cascade under the load of rebuilding your array.

    The one unexpected thing is the drive runtimes were wiped. I could verify by polling the last SMART runs which contained the runtime, and they were in the 4-5 year range.

    As long as you buy drives shipped by Amazon, you get their full 30-day return policy. Just run a long SMART test when the disks arrive.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      The one unexpected thing is the drive runtimes were wiped. I could verify by polling the last SMART runs which contained the runtime, and they were in the 4-5 year range.

      That seems shady. Are you saying that when you ran a new SMART test the drive reported almost no runtime, but the backlog tests showed the actual runtime?

  • 96Retribution@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    No, no, no, no. Nope. Heck no. Amazon packaging is terrible for electronics.

    I want my drives to last 5 - 8 years at least before I even think about checking SMART stats.

    Storage is 101% “you get what you pay for” status in my mind.

    • astern83@alien.topBEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      But you can use that in your favor though. If you run large raid arrays with decent amounts of redundancy, and the right software stack the loss of any one or even two drives really doesn’t impact the entire system.

    • igmyeongui@alien.topBEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      This isn’t true, but I guess it’s a good thing so I can always get white labelled drives if everyone thinks that.

      Search my profile, I made a post about white labelled drives.

      • EtherMan@alien.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Yea never complain about the people that won’t buy cheap. It just makes it cheaper with less demand :)

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      You should anticipate that your storage devices will fail. Drives are consumables. The system that controls the drives should be built for long-term reliability via redundancy. The actual drives should not be expected to have long-term reliability.

  • Rinzlerx@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    I just bought (4) 8tb drives renewed from Amazon for $65 a piece. They are fine so far in my nas but each has 50k hours lol.

    • Quantum_Force@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      I inherited 6x WD Red 3TB drives from work recently and they all have over 60k hours lol, none of them have any smart errors!

  • watr@alien.topBEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    Aren’t surveillance-rated drives a terrible investment for any long-term storage system (long-term being more than 3yrs)

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      This is a good point. Surveillance drives are built with the expectation that they will be writing in video data from a security camera system 24/7, so they’re optimized for a constant data write and less so for read, and really not intended for general-purpose random read/write actions. It’ll still work, but not as well as a NAS drive would.

    • horse1066@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      You’d think so, but I’ve got a 2nd hand purple 4tb surveillance something and it’s been fine for years. I’ve also a bunch of 2nd hand Enterprise(?) 500Gbs that are older than Noah.

      That said I keep anything important on a new 4Tb Red

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Typically these (and the ones on eBay) are used data center drives that have started to show signs of failure, but are not actually failed. Sometimes it’s not even that, they have just reached a certain time in service and been cycled out. For a home user these are a pretty good deal because they’re enterprise quality drives that still have useful life left, and there’s no way you’re going to load them to the level they were designed to handle so they will probably last you several years.

    The risk on these failing unexpectedly is higher because you don’t really know how they were used previously. Run SMART tests on any that you buy as soon as you get them. As long as you’re building some kind of redundancy into your array, you should be fine.

  • PhysicalWriting3430@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Amazon refurbished have worked well for me. I have 24 in 2 NAS systems. 60 days uptime only 1 has died. Got another one and resilvered. No down time.

  • kY2iB3yH0mN8wI2h@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    so it might not be amazon selling these, secondly if I would sell you a car for $99 what do you think? sure this Tesla for 99 seems legit, lets do it?

  • schmoopycat@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I’ve been running one for a few weeks in my NAS as a parity drive.

    It’s fine so far, but damn these are loud. Significantly more than my WD Red of the same capacity (12TB). It’s not a failing drive either, it’s just louder. Probably won’t buy another since my NAS lives in my home office (I’m in an apartment)

  • GentleFoxes@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Drives, condomns and underwear ate a few of the product categories you don’t buy used. Or you have to accept that what the previous owner did with them is going to haunt you.