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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Why is it bad to buy used hard drives and SSDs? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I built my first TrueNAS box using new old stock drives from eBay. Immediately after they arrived I learned SMART can be wiped, so I carefully inspected the drives for physical signs of use. Fingerprints, scuff marks, wear in the screw holes, insertion marks on the pins, that kind of stuff. They had none of those, fortunately, but the sealed anti-static bag had some weird half-English instructions that seemed extremely subpar for Western Digital.

So after careful inspection, all I could really guarantee was ... nothing. They appeared to be unused and the SMART was cleared. So far they've worked well.

But I just didn't sleep well trusting my data to them, so I purchased a set of new drives this week. These old drives are going into a tertiary local backup DAS where they'll be a last resort after my main external drive and cloud backups. They won't be a total loss, but I also won't be relying on them for anything.