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
These are sas though. If you are not using a sas controller they will not work for you. Sata will work in SAS, but not the other way around.
I wouldn’t buy them. Drives are cheap these days and the manufacturing dates on those are too old.
“Cheap” is relative. Sure, they are cheap compared to many moons ago, but doesn’t mean people can just splash out on new 18TB drives.
$20 AUD for 4TB is a bargain for me, would mean I could finally upgrade some of my older gear off the 1/2/3TB drives that they’re rocking.
I have 4 of the WD Enterprise (yellow tabs) 6 TB and they’ve been quite reliable over 3 years…
Way cheaper than buying SATA drives. Got a link to those? 🤣
I have used a bunch of these types of drives without issue. Usually I get ultra star or the hgst ones. I have them in several servers and a NAS. You can’t beat the price. And for me. I would not have any big concerns with using these. If you get one with some type of problem just make sure to return it within the window.
No.
Whilst the drives might be fine there’s not much point trying to cram enterprise drives in a desktop PC. Waste of time this, better off just throwing any old drives in and making sure your backups are in place instead.
If you want to use enterprise gear start with the motherboard and memory, you’re doing this backwards (I’ll refrain from doing the upside down joke here!)
How long have they been on for? No way in hell would I trust my data to drives that have been on for 10 years.
If these were mine they’d be going straight to the scrap bin, they are too old IMO.
If they work, why waste them? 4TB isn’t an insignificant capacity.
I rock a bunch of these used drives, but I also have a backup plan, a few spare drives, and notifications for when a drive problem is detected.
That’s the key with these. My storage box has 16x3tb, all similar used enterprise sas drives, but I’ve got 2x raidz2s and 2 hot spares on top of it. Important stuff is backed up to a 8TB external or Wasabi. alternate between scrubs and long SMART tests weekly.
I’m using loads of refurbed 12G SAS drives in my server - 24x 6TB in fact and they are awesome. Connected via a 36 port multiplier card and controlled by a cheap Avago 9364 12G SAS controller.
Also have a stack of refurbed 1TB 6G SAS 2.5" drives in my other server. They’re all working very well and also run cooler than the 3.5" drives.
ZFS mirror across the lot in each box.
wtf is there to “refurbish” on a harddrive 😂
“squeaky clean platters, wiped the head myself with isopropyl”
Well yeah, there just tested and error free. Plus lift the skirt and blow the cobwebs out. Lol.
I’m selling 10 x 3.5" 4TB HGST SAS drives for $20 ea. I’m in MA, USA.
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.