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 refurb 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?
In the US btw.
I’ll also try just reseating cables in a bit once the scrub finishes. (just in case that’s all it is)
ETA: the other retailer is goharddrive.com. I’m still interested to hear other suggestions if anyone has them.
Edit2: luckily reseating power and sata cables appear to have fixed it for now. the drive is resilvering, so hopefully I’m good. Thanks everyone for the recommendations, as I know one will fail at some point.
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Any Canadian recommendations??
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
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I have nothing to contribute; I’m scared of used drives. Interested to hear who folks have had good luck with though.
Bought 7 4TB SAS drives for $160. They had about 7 years of runtime with no errors after going through the scripts here: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/buddy-backup-and-more-storage-server-part-1-construction/249802. I mixed them with some existing 4TB consumer drives and I’m working on automating my 3-2-1 backup (albiet the 1 is still whenever I get around to it).
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.
ETA: I think I’ll change my title to refurbished.
Just a heads up, I pulled the drive stats from Backblaze’s drive survey, for most brands failure rates accelerate at 4-5 years.
At that point Hitachi, Toshiba, and Seagate all increased in failures. Western Digital didn’t, except for their 2014 batch that immediately dropped off.
Western Digital post 2020 are the most reliable drives.
Hitachi, Toshiba and Seagate seem to hit a cliff around 2-5 years now, but that only kills about 10% of their drives, so with replication you’re probably fine, just make sure to mix drives so you don’t get correlated failures.
good to know, thanks
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.
You should have e a backup after all
Well the “critical/irreplaceable” qualifier is kind of important - that’s why I specified it. It’s up to you to decide what that means for your data and risk tolerance.
For everything that I consider irreplaceable, I’m not comfortable with anything less than 100% duplication on the live system, and also an external offline backup. Even with enterprise-grade hardware, I don’t trust storage devices, they’re all destined to fail. Storage is the most important part of a data server, and should be treated like it is constantly trying to light itself on fire, like a library with wooden shelves lit with torches. All the other components are just as unreliable, but more expendable.
Admittedly, when you account for hot standby drives, the cost is that my storage availability is only 40%. A 16TB storage pool is in fact 5x 8TB drives: 2 mirrored pairs and 1 standby. On the plus side, thanks to ZFS and TrueNAS those drives can be whatever, no need to worry about RAID considerations for matched drives. SAS or SATA? who cares? They can even be different speeds, ZFS will compensate. Buy whatever is the right size for the pool, let the system deal with the other issues.
Can you put a price on stability? longevity? peace of mind?
The server hardware is all old repurposed stuff - a desktop build from 2013, secondhand data center surplus, refurbished/used drives, none of it’s worth much and almost all of it is well past end of life, any part of it could fail without warning at any moment. It doesn’t matter, it is highly reliable because the redundancies have redundancies, including the boot drives. Trying to squeeze every bit of value out of the hardware is a losing game because it’s basically worthless anyway, but the same would be true if it were all new top-of-the-line gear. The hardware is expendable, the data is not. Buy more cheap hardware, plan for it to explode, learn how to build stable, recoverable systems.
Its about balancing your priorities for availability with recouverability. A business loses a lot more money than I do over a couple days downtime.
Mirrored drives are not backup drives, and vice versa. Though ZFS can definitely start to blur the distinction with automated snapshots and especially offsite mirrors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Businesses replace drives and systems on a schedule regardless of true wear on them - their risk vs cost metric is very different than ours.
So used business hardware is a great value for those of us who have a sunk cost in labor/expertise.
Most drives I’ve owned have run for 10+ years, while any business won’t run them past 5. I can take the risk of losing a drive, while it’s more important for a business to prevent losing a drive. Business disruption is a more costly event.
Sure, in a ultra-consumerist world, everybody buy all things new. Now that hard drives cost a kidney, you buy refurbished ones, and you realize that it’s not that bad, especially if you use the right mitigations.
And that’s a trend that may grow and spread to other things, considering that mondialisation will get increasingly difficult due to geopolitics troubles, and petrol becoming costlier over the next years/decades.
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.
I had some bad luck with buying a SAS harddrive on ebay, bought like 3 in a row from different sellers that turned out to be DOA. To be fair, I was going for the lowest cost I could find for the capacity I wanted and ignoring seller reputation, and I did get full refunds after returning them, it was just a pain to keep installing broken harddrives, documenting how they were broken, repacking them and making trips to the post office. The fourth I bought used from Amazon for a little more money and that one worked, I noticed it was also packaged better, in its own harddrive shaped styrofoam thing instead of crammed in a small box with a thin layer of bubble wrap. The whole elapsed process took months. If I had to do it again I’d probably try more non-Amazon sellers again and try to find one that does packaging better and doesn’t try to sell broken shit because I hate Amazon but that is how it played out.
I get mine from a link on diskprices.com
Usually lead to ebay or Amazon - I’m not particular.
They’re almost always used business drives. Oldest one is now 4 years running.
Edit: My major exclusion is SMR, since I’ll be using them in a NAS of some kind (hardware or Proxmox). Today I’m all SATA - if you can, go with SAS, drive costs are lower.
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!
Ha thats good to know. I just retired several hgst sata drives that had greater than 85k hours on them, no errors in them, just thought I was pushing it and taking a chance. Thanks for sharing!
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!
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.
But after knowing all what is really going on with this refurb business, you have to expect to actually use the warranty, that is, see drives actually fail within the warranty period and then request replacements by warranty claims. Not as an exception, but for a good part of all that you have bought “refurbished”.
SMART data will show the data you mentioned; age of the drive, max temperatire, etc.
I always do a full scan of a new drive too - no matter the supplier
For refurbished drives, the SMART values are reset to “new”.
@Zwuzelmaus @Cyber Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t. Even when they are, you’ve still got smart self test log and error log histories. So Power_On_Hours might be “0”, but also might show a short offline test completed at 33,000 hours giving you a hint as to the drive’s true age.
Anyways, I buy used/refurbished ones w/ 5yr warranties from goharddrive, and when one failed this year they honored the warranty and sent me a replacement despite current drive prices… so I’m a happy customer.
OK so 5 years is kinda game changer.
Around here, I have only ever seen 1 year (or none at all).
