Any Canadian recommendations??
post
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
[Thread #118 for this comm, first seen 5th Oct 2026, 12:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I have nothing to contribute; I'm scared of used drives. Interested to hear who folks have had good luck with though.
replies:
I had some bad luck with buying a SAS harddrive on ebay, bought like 3 in a row from different sellers that turned out to be DOA. To be fair, I was going for the lowest cost I could find for the capacity I wanted and ignoring seller reputation, and I did get full refunds after returning them, it was just a pain to keep installing broken harddrives, documenting how they were broken, repacking them and making trips to the post office. The fourth I bought used from Amazon for a little more money and that one worked, I noticed it was also packaged better, in its own harddrive shaped styrofoam thing instead of crammed in a small box with a thin layer of bubble wrap. The whole elapsed process took months. If I had to do it again I'd probably try more non-Amazon sellers again and try to find one that does packaging better and doesn't try to sell broken shit because I hate Amazon but that is how it played out.
It wasn't that long ago that it was generally accepted that you shouldn't buy secondhand/refurbished drives. The world seems to have turned upside down.
replies:
I buy all of mine used from random people via ebay. I've had a few DOA, and a few start throwing errors after a few years. No issues getting replacements or refunds from sellers within the warranty period. Never had one outright fail, nor have I lost any data from this.
I just checked and it turns out two of my drives are over 95,000 hours, that's nearly 11 years! And they're still going strong with no errors!
replies:
I have had luck with this ebay store...hoping this doesn't blow up too much as the prices are still pretty reasonable. But just to note, these are used drives with 20K+ hours on them...SMART data provided for every drive sold. Good luck!
I have several dozen TB of serverpartdeals darddrives. Us based seller. They are extremely professional and prompt and their packaging was incredible.
fairly cheap refurb hard drive seller
Rant:
As a private person, you should avoid refurbished hard drives like the pest!
Imagine buying a used car where the mileage counter has been reset to zero and the vehicle identification number has been tampered with, so that you cannot find out it's history. You see that it looks shiny and you know that it has been checked (well, somewhat), but you don't know that checklist. You even know that nobody knows that checklist.
Seriously, you can only assume the worst about this used hard drive's real condition (years of usage, highest temperature, number of bad sectors...), and also about this reseller.
Refurbished hard drives can only be bought by data centers (or other mass users), where their failure rate is calculated by statistics, but not by 5 or 20 failed drives.
replies:
all 31 comments