Data Hoarder

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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 (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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People’s thoughts on preowned/refurbished hard drives? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I’m currently a student so I don’t have thousands to spend on hard drives and I’d really love to make a compact storage server with large capacity to do stuff like a Plex server. I’ve been looking and I see good deals on sites like eBay, however they seem too cheap sometimes. What are things I should look out for/should I just not get used hard drives?

I need to mention this would not be for critical data such as personal photos etc. it would just be raw data storage that I could afford to lose- it would just be a pain.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They're always a gamble.

Sometimes you have another decade of life in them and sometimes they fail within a month. I wouldn't bother unless I was getting an insanely good deal (like over 50% off retail) as I'm likely to replace it within the year.

I also wouldn't trust them outside of a mirrored or pairity RAID just in case the data on that disk proves to be important