Is this a good idea...

[SkyPhantom]

I want to set up a NAS with two drives running in RAID 1 for cheap, I found these on Amazon. Since RAID 1 mirrors the data, I was thinking it wouldn't such a big deal if one of them fails. 

[Oshino Shinobu]

Wouldn't buy used storage, ever, unless you really do not care about the data being stored on it.

[Morco]

I've used this exact drive for the past like 5 years as my main drive (just upgraded to an m.2 FeelsGoodMan) and it has never failed me at any point so i guess it's a pretty safe bet dispite the price which makes it an absolute bargain.

[Morco]

2 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Wouldn't buy used storage, ever, unless you really do not care about the data being stored on it.

Oh... I didn't actually see it was used... Then nevermind my before posted statement.

[Moz-LJP]

I've never had a WD drive fail on me, only get slightly crappier over time - I bought a used one and ran it for 2 years on a gaming PC and its still in working condition.

 

Maybe go for a WD black - little more expensive but faster than the blues.

 

However, as the others said, used storage is risky business.

 

Good luck to ya

[kelvinhall05]

10 minutes ago, Moz-LJP said:

I've never had a WD drive fail on me, only get slightly crappier over time - I bought a used one and ran it for 2 years on a gaming PC and its still in working condition.

 

Maybe go for a WD black - little more expensive but faster than the blues.

 

However, as the others said, used storage is risky business.

 

Good luck to ya

Completely agree, never had a WD outright die (although I have had them slow down to the point of being unusable).

 

 

OP, don't buy used drives or Seagates.

[SkyPhantom]

Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected. Used-like new means pretty much nothing for electronics. What's wrong with seagates?

[Oshino Shinobu]

 

3 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Completely agree, never had a WD outright die (although I have had them slow down to the point of being unusable).

 

 

OP, don't buy used drives or Seagates.

Do you have a reason for not buying Seagate drives? Most of their bad rep comes from a company called BackBlaze who published some seriously flawed "reliability" reports which have been discredited time and time again. 

 

14 minutes ago, Moz-LJP said:

Maybe go for a WD black - little more expensive but faster than the blues.

The drive he's looking at buying is a used drive for $9. A used Black drive could be $13 and in much worse condition, no way to tell. 

 

1 minute ago, SkyPhantom said:

What's wrong with seagates?

Nothing. There's a misconception that they're unreliable because of massively flawed data from one company from years ago for 1 specific drive. 

[kelvinhall05]

3 minutes ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Do you have a reason for not buying Seagate drives? Most of their bad rep comes from a company called BackBlaze who published some seriously flawed "reliability" reports which have been discredited time and time again. 

I've had new/young Seagates die on me, and I've had equally priced and "tiered" WD drives last longer. I've never had a good experience with a Seagate drive and I see more Seagates failing on various forums or whatever than WDs.

 

And I've never heard of this "backblaze" thing, lol. Probably too young or just haven't been in tech long enough.

[Oshino Shinobu]

1 minute ago, kelvinhall05 said:

I've had new/young Seagates die on me, and I've had equally priced and "tiered" WD drives last longer. I've never had a good experience with a Seagate drive and I see more Seagates failing on various forums or whatever than WDs.

 

And I've never heard of this "backblaze" thing, lol. Probably too young or just haven't been in tech long enough.

Not really a reason to tell others to not buy them outright. By contrast, I've had multiple WD drives die while a Seagate drive in the same system lives on. Really doesn't mean anything as the sample size is too small. 

 

BackBlaze is a cloud storage company that posts their yearly drive failure data. That's fine by itself, but they present it as "reliability" data even though basically every aspect of the conditions and situations where the drives failed is unknown or way too varied to show any reliable trend. 

 

Seagate once had an issue back in 2015 (I think) with a specific 3TB drive where it was failing prematurely. BackBlaze used a load of them in their datacentres (bear in mind these are desktop/consumer drives) and reported something like a 43% failure rate. It seems that this caused a load of people to say Seagate is bad and it spread from there. WD also had a 10%+ failure rate in their tests, which would be WAY too high for them to still be in business. 

 

If you search for my username and BackBlaze, you'll probably find a bunch of posted about this from me XD

[Kisai]

55 minutes ago, SkyPhantom said:

I want to set up a NAS with two drives running in RAID 1 for cheap, I found these on Amazon. Since RAID 1 mirrors the data, I was thinking it wouldn't such a big deal if one of them fails. 

Never buy pre-owned disks. I wouldn't even recommend buying mechanical disks online since the shipper likely won't use enough packing material to keep it from getting damaged. If you're buying disks online, only buy new, RETAIL drives.

 

OEM drives can be obtained for cheaper, but usually are sent to the company selling them in a bulk carrier, so they may not be adequately packed outside of that carrier. 

 

If you're wanting to recycle/reuse disks, get them locally so you can return them if they don't work. Usually large quantites of drives never come on the market because businesses have to destroy the drives or securely erase them, and securely erasing them costs someone two hours of time, where as destroying them is 90 seconds.