Approx 35k power on hours. Tested with 0 errors, 0 bad sectors, 0 defects. SMART details intact.
That’s about 4 years of power on time. Considering they’re enterprise grade equipment, they should still be good for many years to come, but it is worth taking into consideration.
I’ve bought from these guys before, packaging was super professional. Card board box with special designed drive holders made of foam; each drive is also individually packed with anti-static bags and silica packs.
Came here to ask about the hours. Some quick searching looked like 5 years is an average time to failure, but that might have been for lower-grade hardware?
Backblaze has drives with very similar models in service, has an annualized failure rate of less than 1% on average, and have been in service for 5 years. The average age will continue to rise as usage time continues to rack up.
This is pretty standard for enterprise equipments — comes with some amount of years of warranty, enterprises depreciate the cost over that many years and sell them as/before the warranty expires to get whatever value they can get (as far as books concerned, they’re already depreciated to $0 anyway).
I too like posting cryptic, non-detailed complaints with minimal to no explanation, logic, or rationale for the express intent to sow confusion and chaos while simultaneously standing for nothing
On Reddit, wallstreetbets used to call everything “retarded” and they’ve stopped and moved to “regarded” as a way of “almost” saying an offensive word.
It was bad, and the funny part is that they were using Retarded as a slur too much and had it taken away after complaints from civil rights watch groups, as disabilities are a protected class, but the proponents would try to claim they were using it as a term of endearment in the ultimate bad faith argument.
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.
I dunno, I’m one of those people who never stops using a drive until it breaks, and they never really break anymore. Oldest in my current PC is probably 20 year old HDD.
So yeah, these probably are fine and will still last a long time. But for like $20 more you don’t have to worry about losing the data on it.
Edit:
Apparently prices just haven’t changed in half a decade or longer? I knew prices went up for COVID, assumed they went back down at some point.
They’re much cheaper than $20 off a new drive. I bought a 14TB WD server drive from them within the last year for less than it cost me to get an 8TB Elements/Easystore on sale back in 2018. It was easily 50% of the new price for a similar drive.
I used to use https://shucks.top/ a lot while looking for deals to fill up my NAS... the site doesn't work now because of API things, but you can still see their historic "best price" and even the 8TB wd external drives barely got down to $120, so I'm not sure where you were seeing 12tb for $120 regularly. For brand new drives, like $12-13/tb was a good deal. $12/tb was generally low and rare enough I'd basically instabuy it.
Not to sound snarky or anything, but since when do prices go down? If people were willing to pay the inflated price, there’s no incentive for them not to make that the new standard.
I agree to some extent, but even before then hardware was getting expensive thanks to stuff like the Bitcoin mining craze. Harddrives have been getting cheaper on a dollar per TB basis for a long time (as they should), but I remember the days when it was cheaper to build a gaming PC than to buy a new console, and those days are long gone. And after COVID hit, greedflation set in to declare what the new normal is.
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 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%.
2nd catch, behind the power on time: 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)
They are also enterprise drives which consume slightly more power and more importantly generate more noise/clicking sounds on average when compared to a consumer drive. Depending on where you were planning to install them, it might not be the best option.
I have a similar one, different seller and possibly submodel, but also a refurb HGST 12T enterprise drive. It sounds like I left a soda on my desk most of the time, subtly popping and ticking.
These are used drives that have about 35K hours (4 years) of power on time.
Good quality drives to be sure, but maybe not as reliable now as they once were.
Refurbished drive. I’ve had 4 white label drives running for a number of years without issue, planning on eventually getting 12 more and maxing out my servers.
Unfortunately that’s years down the line :(
No issues what’s so ever. Have them in a four drivE QNAS. I was a bit concerned about them being cheaper drives initially but after I got them installed I literally haven’t thought about them again in terms of reliability.
0 complaints and they seem to be doing about as well as some more expensive drives might be.
I mean, I don’t know your use case, but as a self-hoster/ research scientist, I think my usage is much much. And I do rely on mine for business, as my wife and I both rely on it for hosting our data, which for me is large geospatial datasets, and when I’m doing large compute runs, there are many many read writes. We also store a large amount of music/ videos for streaming and running a jelly fin server. Thats been fine as well. I think since in our case we don’t have a ton of people hitting the server at once, its just never as stressed as it might be in a corporate/ multi user environment.
Thank you, I also know it’s a lottery and hopefully I get a nice unit.
I’m going to use it solo as a home server to sync, store and read data. And eventually as a streaming server for jelly fin too, mostly for myself only too.
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%
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.
I’ve bought a fair amount of drives from them and have had no issues, just today I got in some seagate exos 2x18 drives from them and their packaging was as professional ever.
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