I just bought two of their 12TB for $100 each and they were the manufactured recertified. One had like 8 hours run time and the second had like 36 hours so brand new for the lifetime of a hard drive. So far no issues. Also beware these drives are very loud.
Amazon reseller for xbox drives was getting 10 year old dirty crusty drives and swapping the HD controller to a more recent one. So SMART report looked like a young drive. Xbox casing had a sticker or warranty void. So me being me wondered and opened it to find a dirty ass old drive inside. i called Amazon and initially they said it is outside of return window and warranty…But i explained it doesn’t matter when I detected the fraud it is still fraud. So they gave me my money back
This has got me concerned, wondering how do you tell it’s old if the controller is replaced? Are there serials or dates on the other parts or just obvious wear?
For the ones I had, the corrosion of the metal and stained labels was the give away (looked like they had been out on an autoshop repair bench), but each part had its own label dates. HDD was way older date than the controller board.
I think there is a difference on Refurbished drives and Manufactured recertified. On server part deals the prices were different and manufactured recertified being a little more expensive for the same drive. So I assumed the drives were send back from a data center and tested again but they cant be spelled as new.
Plus tax. Finland is stopping everything from outside EU and demanding proof that tax is paid. So I have to look at the prices with postage and add 24%.
It’s “refurbed” by the seller. It also says it has approximately 35,000 hours on it. That’s 4 years of continual use. I wouldn’t trust that with anything.
Depends on the usage. That’s the gamble you take. I would maybe buy three and put two in a mirror and keep the third one as a replacement?
That’s 240$ for three drives without warranty though… Nevermind I’d prefer to buy two new Toshiba X300 new for 210$ a piece and forget the headache and get the warranty.
The Toshiba x300 is a consumer drive, the drive they are offering is an enterprise grade storage drive. I have only bought enterprise or nas speed drives in the past. Consumer drives may not be built to the same standards.
It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.
I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.
I’m running Raid z2;and have considered even z3 which should be plenty of redundancy for older drives. Well that and backing up data to a separate location.
Do HDDs noticably degrade when powered off? I’m thinking about getting one of these for cold storage backups. Also, how much of an impact does repeated power cycling have on lifespan?
HDDs are your best option for long-term storage. Every storage mechanism fails eventually but HDDs are convenient, last long, and have excellent data recovery.
Reposting as top level comment also: these are PWDIS drives: if you’re not using them somewhere with sata 3.2/3.3, you need to use an adapter for the power plug, or some tape, to block pins 1-3 (3.3v) as supplying it to these causes them to reset. Might be worth doing the taping anyway, if you’re using an enclosure or cage (where you can’t use the adapters) Just be aware.
How do I know if I’m using sata 3.2/3.3 vs something else?
I have one of these in the 8 TB variant that I use for backup purposes, and I plug it into one of those USB docks, like this one. I have not applied any tape or adaptors and it seems to be working fine.
When I bought some of these earlier this year, the re-seller included an adapter that blocked those pins to prevent the reset issue. Didn’t know what they were for at first and almost tossed them. (I should have read the included slip of paper)
When you’re shipping one item, sure… kinda. When you’re shipping five, it doesn’t make sense to tape the exact same thing to every single one. Especially if the paper is bigger than the item.
We typically affix it to the invoice and package so it’s seen first thing. That’s the best solution we’ve come up with.
Thomann crew checking in! Bought my first “real” guitar from them and she’s still my favourite despite being given a Les Paul by Bowling For Soup this year. I really should play that baby
I’ve used vykingship, a shipping forwarder, before to ship from US to EU. it basically gives you an us address to ship things to and they will ship it to you.
I’ve found their rates are usually cheaper than direct from the store.
Of course customs and duty charges will still apply.
I have bought from them before and they are pretty good. I bought 4 of those exact drives from them back in February, they passed extended SMART. They have been running great in my ZFS pool.
Never ask a man his pay, a woman her weight/age, or a data horder the contents of their stash.
Jk. Mostly.
I have a similar-ish set up to @Davel23 , I have a couple of cool use cases.
I seed the last 5 arch and opensuse (a few different flavors) ISOs at all times
I run an ArchiveTeam warrior for archive.org
I scan nontrivial mail (the paper kind) and store it in docspell for later OCR searches, tax purposes etc.
I help keep Sci-Mag healthy
I host several services for de-googling, including Nextcloud, Blocky, Immich, and Searxng
I run Navidrome, that has mostly (and hopefully will soon completely) replace Spotify for my family.
I run Plex (hoping to move to Jellyfin sometime, but there's inertial resistance to that) that has completely replaced Disney streaming, Netflix streaming, etc for me and my extended family.
I host backups for my family and close friends with an S3 and WebDAV backup target
I run Frigate on a few PoE cameras in the forest behind my house to check out wildlife
I use the audio streams from my cameras to check for birdsong, identify birds, and archive and submit the detections to a citizen science website (https://app.birdweather.com)
I run 4x14TB, 2x8TB, 2x4TB, all from serverpartsdeals, in a ZFS RAID10 with two 1TB cache dives, so half of the spinning rust usable at ~35TiB, and right now I'm at 62% utilization. I usually expand at about 85%
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