this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Need guidance, storage purchase imminent, limited budget. Recert / Refurb Drives (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I need to reach a certain amount of space but have a limited budget. I saw these refurb drives on bargainhardware a while back and waited through BF to see if anything close to the £/TB came up. Unfortunately the UK doesn't seem to have seen any such deals.

My budget is limited, I also already have some older smaller drives that would form part of the array. I would likely be using unRAID with 2 of the purchased drives being Parity drives, or the same with SnapRAID. I feel that 2x Parity is neccessary to ensure that I can protect against inevitable failure, my current 4TB drives approach 5 years in use, and the refurb drives are between 3 and 5 years old according to the seller (datacentre use). If you feel you can suggest better alternatives or new drives that fit the bill please let me know. I feel that I would be unlikely to return a storage drive under warranty.

  • 4x 10TB HGST HUH721010ALN600 £86.40 - £345.60. 20TB pool, approx 5 years usage.
  • 3x 12TB WD HC520 HUH721212ALE601 £132 - £396. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), approx 3 years usage.
  • 3x 12TB EMC Seagate ST12000NM005G £120 - £360. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), unknown time in use, Seagate?

I don't want to go above £400, I have a need for at least 10TB in the pool and in my mind 2 Parity drives is mitigating some of the risk with refurb drives. Am I going about this the wrong way?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The key to keeping your data longterm is not RAID. raidisnotabackup.com Unless you run a critical server 2 drive parity with 3 total drives is total overkill.

If you are fine with a bit of downtime during recovery I would not bother with RAID at all if you only need a single drive to satisfy your storage needs. Only when you have multiple drives being able to resilver rather than restore is worth the premium. You might want to get a new drive as they do not cost that much extra and will likely live a fair bit longer so they do not cost anything extra in the long run. You might use some of those refurb drives for your backup server though.

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

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have 4x 4TB drives that will be brought in (prior array), so this would eventually be 5-6 drives once the drives are in, with room to add more from there. Thank you for the advice, I'll see if I can get close with 1p new and a backup drives.

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

Out of interest, where are there new drives that cost not much more. When I look at retail in the UK, a 10TB drive is 3 times the cost of these 4-5 year used refurbs. If I could find something 0 -100% more I would likely go new.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You need at least like 5-6 drives for double parity to be economical. Aside from that you need backup.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you - I have 4 other 4TB drives that would make up the pool and several 2TB drives. I would estimate this to be a pool size starting at 5+ drives and rising, so I wanted to get the parity in place now. But this makes sense, I am considering how to approach a 1 parity situaiton.

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

Note that any sane RAID software will limit the size used on each drive to the size of the smallest drive in the array.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I would stay away from reconditioned

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

What is your experience?

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

Hmm, het the drives, check the smart data and run the full surface test. If the drives pass the tets, you should be fine. Also, clarify about warranty on refurb drives since they usually have a limited warranty for 2 years.