this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Exactly, my nas is currently made up of decommissioned 18tb exos. Great deal and I can usually still get them rma’d the handful of times they fail
Where is a good place to search for decommissioned ones?
Serverpartdeals has done me well, drives often come new enough that they still have a decent amount of manufacturers warranty remaining (exos is 5yr) and depending on the drive you buy from them spd will rma a drive for 5 years from purchase (but not always, depends on the listing, read the fine print).
I have gotten 2 bad drives from them out of 18 over 5 years or so. Both bad drives were found almost immediately with basic maintenance steps prior to adding to the array (zeroing out the drives, badblocks) and both were rma’d by seagate within 3-5 days because they were still within the mfr warranty.
If you’re running a gigantic raid array like me (288tb and counting!) it would be wise to recognize that rotational hard drives are doomed and you need a robust backup solution that can handle gigantic amounts of data long term. I have a tape drive for that because I got it cheap at an electronics recycler sold as not working (thankfully it was an easy fix) but this is typically a super expensive route. If you only have like 20tb then you can look into stuff like cloud services, bluray, redundant hard drive, etc. or do like I did in the beginning and just accept that your pirated anime collection might go poof one day lol
What kind of tape drive are you using? My array isn't as large as yours (120tb physical), but it's big enough that my only real options for backup are tape or a whole secondary array for just backup.
Based on what I've seen, my options are a prohibitively large number tapes with an older LTO standard or prohibitively expensive tapes with a newer LTO standard.
My current backup strategy consists of automated backups to Backblaze B2 for the really important stuff like personal documents or projects and hoping my ZFS array doesn't fail for everything else.
eBay sellers that have tons of sales and specialize. You can learn to read between the lines and see that decom goods are what they do.
SaveMyServer is a perfect example. Don't know if they sell drives though.
Nice, where do you get yours?
also curious, buying new is getting too pricey for me
I personally use goharddrive and serverpartdeals on eBay and have had good luck, but I'm always looking for others
Never used goharddrive but can def endorse spd