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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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!

Thanks for this. I do have 1 from them that i believe is under warranty for another year.

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.

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.

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.