There’s currently a sale on the Western Digital website. I was thinking of getting the Red Pros since they’re high capacity and relatively quiet. In a previous post I made on the datahoarders community, I was looking for an HDD that was basically silent since the NAS will be next to my desk where I WFH.
Currently, two 18 TB drives are going for $620 or about $17.22 per TB. Not the best deal but definitely better than their normal price. I know a lot of people like buying used drives but the ones for sale are usually loud enterprise edition drives which won’t work for me. Should I buy the drives now or wait until BF for a possibly better sale?
Honestly I’d recommend buying refurbished drives and using them in a RAID array so that you can easily replace one for cheap(ish) if it goes bad.
before anyone says “RAID is not a backup” yeah I know but you can’t deny its capability to function as such. 3-2-1 always applies.
serverpartdeals.com
Set up an alert for when the drive you want goes on sale/in stock
to be fair, the drive in question is a NAS drive, which is not a backup drive by its intended default usecase, unless you slapped it in a nas thats stored as a cloud storage in an offsite location.
its just a matter of people understanding that data redundancy is not a backup, just a level of data safeguard, as it only partially covers some of the forms of data loss and not all of them (e.g not immune to physical methods of data loss like fires, floods and stuff)
RAID is carrying a spare tire in your car. Backups are like having an extra car in the garage in case your primary geta totaled.
It’s possible you’ll never need either one, but if you pop a flat, a whole extra car is overkill.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, since most people don’t have a spare car.
Most people don’t have a RAID to fall back on either, and I would argue most cars’ donuts or spares haven’t been checked since the car was new so I think it holds up better than you’re giving it credit for lol
As someone who has worked in the it industry doing server work for 20+ years, definitely cannot agree with used drives. Always buy new if you can. Refurb drives are a huge risk whether or not they could have subsequent issues after being repaired. If you value your data, do not buy refurbs.
Edit - also consider most refurb drives are prob only a year warranty vs a probable 5 year on new WDs. To save a couple bucks, totally worth the extra warranty period.
I used to think that way too, then realized, who gives a fuk if using 321 backup method and have a cheaper spare on hand doesnt matter. Also this isnt enterprise, where i wouldnt even think about getting used.
Serverpartdeals is very reputable seller of refurb drives with low usage. Buy few in size you qant put them in a zfs or raid1 and move on with your life. However just make sure you have error chexking and drive tests on to find faulty drives and alerts you have tested working before you set it and forget it.
You can buy twice as many drives, though.
well…its a hit or miss, i recently just got lucky with 2 16tb drives i got for 400, it probably came from a chinese chia server or some shit idk, but i did basic checks like SMART and they seem fine. I had my rx580 years ago also probably from a mining data center.
My logic and xp with these used “enterprise” stuff is that they are definitely used but not as abused like being OCed, etc. because they are optimized to run for a long time unless they are being decomissioned.
Also from the industry, can confirm.
Value the redundancy, make backups of data that can’t easily be replaced.
Aint that hard to learn.
Can you sleep loosing a movie on your disk?
Can you also sleep loosing an entire photo album on your disk?