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Say Hello to the World's Largest Hard Drive, a Massive 36TB Seagate (www.vice.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Refurbished drives sound scary. Any data to point towards that not being a problem?

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If you've got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.

    If you're really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yep staggering manufacturing dates is a good suggestion. I do it but it does make purchasing during sales periods to get good prices harder. Better than losing multiple drives at once, but RAID needs a backup anyway and nobody should skip that step.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you've got considerable cash.

    Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that's a good candidate for more white label drives.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    As mentioned by another user, all drives fail, it's a matter of when, not if. Which is why you should always use RAID arrangement with at least one redundant drive and/or have full backups.

    Ultimately, it's a money game. If you save 30% on a recertified drive and it has 20% less total life than a new one, you're winning.

    Here's where I got some.

    https://serverpartdeals.com/collections/manufacturer-recertified-drives

    I looked around a bit, and either search engines suck nowadays (possibly true regardless) or there are no independent studies comparing certified and new drives.

    All you get mostly opinion pieces or promises by resellers that actually, their products are good. Clearly no conflict of interest there. /s

    The best I could find was this, but that's not amazing either.

    What I do is look at backblaze's drive stats for their new drives, find a model that has a good amount of data and low failure rate, then get a recertified one and hope their recertification process is good and I don't get a lemon.

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