I’ve recently converted an old 2013 office PC into an Ubuntu file and media server and used the only hard drive I had laying aound, which was a ~13 year old, 500GB 2.5" laptop hdd.

I live in Australia where drives are really expensive. Is it worth getting a sas card and buying these drives for $20 each? Seller says they’re from 2013-2014, all drives tested and working with not SMART issues found.

Thanks

  • untamedeuphoria@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I have never seen a drive without any issues reported by SMART. Not even brand new ones. Problems reported by SMART are more of a threshhold of amount of reported issues.

    I would get brand and model matched ones and put them in a zpool with RAIDz2. You might opt for RAIDz1. Mixing drives is possible. But you will want to make sure the physical sector size and cache exactly match, and read/write speeds are close to matching (within 25-30 MB/s). For this and confirming the SMART readout crystaldiskinfo and crystaldiskmark are your friends… or smartctl and dd on linux.

    I would say that $20 a piece are worth in it in the Aus market, but you should expect them to fail, and they are a temporary stopgap at that age. You should use them as a holdover while you save for a legitimate replacement.

    It’s worth noting thate sas drives are not the same as sata. They a generally longer lived, they also tend to have a higher RPM, and thus a higher read/write rate. For this reason when you do replace them and move to a slower modern solution you should still use them for high speed access tasks. Like running VMs or databases. This only applies if they are 15k RPM ones, and for extra speed I would short strike them. You also should note that the sas connector is different from the sata connector. You will need a HBA or mobo with said ports and the associated sas cables.