This is a great reference:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
Serverpartdeals is a good source for cheaper drives.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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I bought two of those serverpartdeals drives after seeing them recommended on reddit after searching for good refurbished drives and they have been running fine for a few months now with no errors in the smart data
Bought 8 16TB Ultrastars from them. Haven't had a single issue with them
I'm using a western digital refurb HDD. 14TB.
running 24/7 pretty much since the pandemic. It's basically my media server.
I've used serverpartdeals for 2 Seagate 16TB drives. I had 1 drive start to show signs of premature failure (unusually slow read/write speeds and read errors).
Their support is amazing. They 2nd day Air shipped me a replacement (after asking for advanced replacement) so I could rebuild my array before returning the old drive. No cost to me.
Good service gives me way more confidence in a store front than just positive product reviews. Can't recommend these guys enough.
They know that if a customer is noticing those signs that they're savvy enough to pick a different solution if they don't offer good support
There's a lot of comments talking about used and refurbs. I personally use these types to get good deals but I also have a reasonably robust backup protocol. Not a full 321 backup but an appropriate level of risk for my needs.
My point being, if you go that route, they're cheaper but the odds that one dies on you might be higher. Make sure you manage your backup strategy to a risk value you're comfortable with.
That said, I've also had great experiences with serverpartdeals. I've also used diskprices.com to find deals.
Things to consider are noise, temps, power-on time, etc. For myself, temps are fairly consistent in my case and it's in a closet so I don't care about noise. I also don't need particularly fast access on the HDDs (I use an nvme cache strategy as well) so I can pretty much use whatever. Your needs might differ.
I've been buying used 12tb HGST from Amazon for $80.
I always buy new because time spent fixing a problem or recovering data with a used drive ain’t worth it to me. It may be to you. A manufacturer refurb might be ok, in fact I do buy refurb monitors sometimes, but not data storage.
I've been running a 12 bay nas for 8 years the only drives I have had fail have been Seagate drives.
I now use WD reds and lately due to their very good price point on eBay Toshiba drives.
Although the Toshiba drives do seem to be slightly noisier so depends where your server is located.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #874 for this sub, first seen 17th Jul 2024, 04:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I've been buying Water Panther refurbished drives.
Both Arsenal (had them for a while) and SaveGreen (they just released recently) and have any had a good experience with them for how cheap they are with warranty.
Only filed 1 RMA, and the turnaround was fairly quick.
They are also Seagate drives, and the SaveGreens have different firmware
I have a mix of shucked, new, and used drives in my home server.
WD reds out of some USB enclosures that are pushing 7 years old, some new EXOS drives that are pushing 4, and some refurbed EXOS drives that are pushing 2 years now.
Zero issues, but I'm also running them as basically stand-alone drives with mergerfs and snapraid. I don't really care about 99% of the data, since I can just like, download all the ISOs again, but in x265 encoded versions.
7 drives, zero failures, though I'm expecting the 8tb reds to start dying any minute now.