datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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personally, i would never buy a used drive
Depends. Are we taking refurbished, or returned sales?
Refurbished is going to have to be hella cheap to consider it for a highly redundant storage of unimportant things maybe raid 10 backup storage it something.
Returned sales are mostly still as good a new and returned for various unrelated reasons. As long as I get full warranty and right to return as if it was brand new, i don't mind.
I run used disks with tens of thousands of power on hours. Yes the risk of each disk dying is higher but only marginally and the cost is dramatically lower. To avoid data loss when they die, I have functioning backups. This system is working really well for me.