I’m looking for 16TB HDDs. They’ll be for fairly light usage. Immich will be the heaviest thing running on it.
New? Used? Certified? Like this?
This is a great reference:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/Serverpartdeals is a good source for cheaper drives.
I’ve used serverpartdeals for 2 Seagate 16TB drives. I had 1 drive start to show signs of premature failure (unusually slow read/write speeds and read errors).
Their support is amazing. They 2nd day Air shipped me a replacement (after asking for advanced replacement) so I could rebuild my array before returning the old drive. No cost to me.
Good service gives me way more confidence in a store front than just positive product reviews. Can’t recommend these guys enough.
They know that if a customer is noticing those signs that they’re savvy enough to pick a different solution if they don’t offer good support
There’s a lot of comments talking about used and refurbs. I personally use these types to get good deals but I also have a reasonably robust backup protocol. Not a full 321 backup but an appropriate level of risk for my needs.
My point being, if you go that route, they’re cheaper but the odds that one dies on you might be higher. Make sure you manage your backup strategy to a risk value you’re comfortable with.
That said, I’ve also had great experiences with serverpartdeals. I’ve also used diskprices.com to find deals.
Things to consider are noise, temps, power-on time, etc. For myself, temps are fairly consistent in my case and it’s in a closet so I don’t care about noise. I also don’t need particularly fast access on the HDDs (I use an nvme cache strategy as well) so I can pretty much use whatever. Your needs might differ.
I’m using a western digital refurb HDD. 14TB.
running 24/7 pretty much since the pandemic. It’s basically my media server.
A WD? I also like living dangerously.gif 😊
I kid of course. It could be absolutely appropriate depending on the data and budget.
It is absolutely a dangerous life lol.
I keep everything backed up. It was a temporary purchase that I fully did not expect to last 5 years.
It’s literally been a clicker since day 1 lol.
No failures. No slow reads. Just a zombie beast.
I bought 5x 16T recertified WD from SPD. Running in RAIDz2 (2-disk redundancy) config since April. I’ve yet to have an issue. They have 3 years manufacturer warranty so it’s not even a huge deal if some die in a while. I paid USD $160 per drive.
What do you use for raid?
ZFS
To add to that. With ZFS raid everything is done with software so their is no hardware lockin.
I’ve been buying Water Panther refurbished drives.
Both Arsenal (had them for a while) and SaveGreen (they just released recently) and have any had a good experience with them for how cheap they are with warranty.
Only filed 1 RMA, and the turnaround was fairly quick.
They are also Seagate drives, and the SaveGreens have different firmware
I’ve been buying used 12tb HGST from Amazon for $80.
I’ve been running a 12 bay nas for 8 years the only drives I have had fail have been Seagate drives.
I now use WD reds and lately due to their very good price point on eBay Toshiba drives.
Although the Toshiba drives do seem to be slightly noisier so depends where your server is located.
I always buy new because time spent fixing a problem or recovering data with a used drive ain’t worth it to me. It may be to you. A manufacturer refurb might be ok, in fact I do buy refurb monitors sometimes, but not data storage.
Sounds a bit like not enough redundancy. Once you go into redundant mode, the individual disk quality is no longer nearly as important. 2 or 3 disk redundancy, and you can use whatever garbage comes your way.
All well and good until you lose another disk 2 days into re-striping. Which is not that uncommon because that puts a lot of load on the surviving disks! Remember, RAID is not a backup.
That’s why the extra redundancy. The probability of 2 or 3 disks failing should be significantly lower than 1 disk failing. I currently run 2-disk redundancy. If 1 disk fails, I’d replace it. If a second disk fails while the replacement is being resilvered, I’d shit a brick, stop the resilver and make an incremental backup to ensure I won’t lose data if another disk fails due to the resilver load. Then I’d proceed with the resilver. RAID is not backup and the extra redundancy is there to reduce the probability to have to spend time restoring backups. Increased redundancy can compensate for individual disk reliability.
