I found CHEAP hard drives on eBay!

[HC_writes]

We’ve said more than once to never buy a used hard drive. But file sizes are increasing across the board, so could it actually make more sense to turn to the used market – like ebay or craigslist - for more storage capacity…even if the hard drives were used for crypto mining?

 

 

Buy a new Seagate Exos: https://geni.us/fs97sH

Buy a new WD Blue: https://geni.us/B5pJtA

Buy a used hard drive on eBay: https://geni.us/7TkSVg

Buy a used Seagate Exos: https://geni.us/Aioa

 

 

[bigzary123]

does anyone know what software they are using to test these drives??

[Dutch_Master]

It was shown in the video, about 5:10m in.

[SupaKomputa]

I use HDD Sentinel for most of my HDD diagnostic.

[bigzary123]

18 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

It was shown in the video, about 5:10m in.

tysm

[bigzary123]

10 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

I use HDD Sentinel for most of my HDD diagnostic.

just installed it this is gonna save me so much money. i have alot of old drives that i dont know if they work or anything my family just brings me random computer shit as im the "tech support guy" so this is a must have

[Senzelian]

I bought 4 1TB WD Reds for my NAS and another 2 3TB WD Reds for ... I don't even know anymore. Either way, when I bought them I made sure the seller included a SMART screenshot and so far I had 0 issues with any of these drives.

[Naijin]

1 hour ago, bigzary123 said:

does anyone know what software they are using to test these drives??

CrystalDiskInfo, Hard Disk Sentinel, Victoria HDD, HDtune

(spelling error in Hard Disk Sentinal in the video)

[mariushm]

Servethehome forums often has listings for hard drives in their "great deals" thread.

For example, this seller esisoinc was recommended there and had over 875 SAS 6 TB drives sold for around $50 each.

 

They have 4 TB SATA HGST drives for $37 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/284456123376

Or 4 TB Dell branded WD drives for $40 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/133736665754

 

[darwin006]

I bought 9 Seagate 16TB Exos drives new about a year ago. I have had 3 fail, each time Seagate replaced them under warranty no questions asked. Buying a hard drive without a 5 year warranty just seems like a bad idea to me.

[Lord Szechenyi]

 

How did this get approved?

[tim0901]

*snip* nvm missed something

[JTS_1401]

I was trying for the 1 2 3 strategy but my brand new 10TB EXOS drive failed mid upload to cloud. I had to get the 1 week old hard drive data recovered which was quite annoying and sad as I had just erased my dying raid array of eight 500GB used eBay harddrives. So annoying I really thought my photos would be safer on the shiney new harddruve. Even worse was the fact that the new EXOS drive was my first brand new hard drive I had bought in years. Previously, I had been salvaging drives from dead tech and using them and I had no issues with data loss until I decided to listen to expert opinion. This has been an annoyance over the past months hopping the data recovery professionals can get my documents, photos, and videos. I spent over 800 USD trying to make my data more secure and have now ended up in a worse position then when I only spent 80 USD on used hardware and no cloud or backup.

 

EDIT: I have been backing up my files to USB since I cant afford to alter the file structure on my cloud service. 

[bluehawk]

I still don't fully understand the difference between Exos and Ironwolf. I know Exos is for enterprise, but the value for them always seems better than IronWolfs

[Zerrymause]

Exos is rated for higher workrates. I guess Seagate just has higher yields than expected, and so they have overstock of exos drives?

Sometimes ""new"" drives from amazon, ebay, or newegg sellers won't come with warranty. Check descriptions to see if it should come with warranty. If it does, you can thrash the drive for a few months to see if it fails, replace it if it does, and put it into regular use if it doesn't. With Seagate, they come with a year or two of data recovery for Exos, Skyhawk, and IronWolf Pro drives, I think? So you can probably get your critical data back, if not quickly. Do make sure to check if the warranty is valid, though.
Bathtub curve for harddrives is super real. Never trust a brand new drive with critical data imho.

[Needfuldoer]

When I built my NAS, I shucked WD Elements drives. At least they come with more than a taillight warranty.

[JTS_1401]

39 minutes ago, Zerrymause said:

Exos is rated for higher workrates. I guess Seagate just has higher yields than expected, and so they have overstock of exos drives?

Sometimes ""new"" drives from amazon, ebay, or newegg sellers won't come with warranty. Check descriptions to see if it should come with warranty. If it does, you can thrash the drive for a few months to see if it fails, replace it if it does, and put it into regular use if it doesn't. With Seagate, they come with a year or two of data recovery for Exos, Skyhawk, and IronWolf Pro drives, I think? So you can probably get your critical data back, if not quickly. Do make sure to check if the warranty is valid, though.
Bathtub curve for harddrives is super real. Never trust a brand new drive with critical data imho.

Yes I am using Seagates data recovery plan. Now I know not to use a brand new drive for important data. I would go back to the ebay drives that I have but the healthy drives I have on hand only comes up to 3 TB and the data I have is 3.6TB spread over 9 hard drives. 

[dogwitch]

bought exos drives,wd, some suck drive. etc

i use both companies tool they use to check them .when you send them in to them.

that being those tools take depend on drive size. days to complete.

 

i only had 2 drives fail on me.

1 was it was damage in shipping seller poorly pack it.

other one was damage just enough to fail the test.(seller used same test i do and it work. ) so he refunded me the money.

[sydh]

Never knew the ID numbers for S.M.A.R.T. went past 09. It looks like they are showing the Hex vs ID as per the scrolling NTFS article. Every tool I recall using with the ID's has it listed like this.

 

Speccy/ CrystalDiskInfo

05    Reallocated Sectors Count

BB    Reported Uncorrectable Errors

BC    Command Timeout

C5    Current Pending Sector Coun

C6    Uncorrectable Sector Count

 

[danwat1234]

So, I purchased over 60 used 4TB hard drives from eBay for Chia farming (no it hasn't been profitable). It's been about a year of continuous use. Very few have failed! It's hard to tell which have truly failed and which has lost connection due to USB dock issues. Install is under a bed so it is not easy to dissect. I lost connection on a number of them in the early days but for about 9 months now, farm size has been consistent. 
Majority of them had 40-60K hours on them when I got them. Some are WDs all 7200, some are Hitachi 7200, some 5400, some are Seagate 7200, some 5400. For unimportant storage, it is definitely worth it the reduced cost/TB and reduced carbon footprint of not having new drives manufactured. Though, it does make you wonder about the people unable to buy the drives I bought, if they ended up buying new negating this benefit?
A note, I also have a huge Distributed Computing farm (Linus Tech Tips team) and 1 of the drives in my PCs (labelled Haswell#11 in BOINC) is a WD2502ABYS Enterprise grade drive with 86.5K hours on it. SMART report is perfect! Some drives are engineered really well!
I say that power cycle count is very important to judge drive wear. Temperature cycles causes wear, whereas if it's only had like 25 power cycles, you know it's been at a consistent temperature through most of its life. Almost all my drives do have a low power cycle count. 

 

[leadeater]

@HC_writesJust started watching the video, so keep that in mind lol, but well the opening comment about "might be used for crypto" is a little well.. not actually all that well thought out or really that concerning versus the most common workloads these large capacity enterprise HDDs get used for.

 

Pretty much the most common usage for these now is for backup storage arrays and SDS Object Stores again for backup data. Very large environments with large amounts of data will punish these HDDs all day every day for their entire life, my work being such a place like that.

 

Backups are always happening, SQL T-Logs, VM incremental backups, data verification, replication to other sites etc. Our disks are never idle, not even slightly.

 

So yea sure Chia mining might, well will, put a large workload on them but so will the most common usage of these and where most of the used market supply comes from.

 

For the most part HDDs even after this are fine, they can go well past the 5-8 years we keep ours for, hell if one is lucky they'll be getting one warranty replaced a year before getting tossed out with the full system replacement.

 

TL;DR Mining isn't really the big bad scary here, that would be the standard every day usage they get used for 

[danwat1234]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

@HC_writesJust started watching the video, so keep that in mind lol, but well the opening comment about "might be used for crypto" is a little well.. not actually all that well thought out or really that concerning versus the most common workloads these large capacity enterprise HDDs get used for.

 

Pretty much the most common usage for these now is for backup storage arrays and SDS Object Stores again for backup data. Very large environments with large amounts of data will punish these HDDs all day every day for their entire life, my work being such a place like that.

 

Backups are always happening, SQL T-Logs, VM incremental backups, data verification, replication to other sites etc. Our disks are never idle, not even slightly.

 

So yea sure Chia mining might, well will, put a large workload on them but so will the most common usage of these and where most of the used market supply comes from.

 

For the most part HDDs even after this are fine, they can go well past the 5-8 years we keep ours for, hell if one is lucky they'll be getting one warranty replaced a year before getting tossed out with the full system replacement.

 

TL;DR Mining isn't really the big bad scary here, that would be the standard every day usage they get used for 

I went to clarify that, yes Chia mining is a 100% disk usage scenario, unless done within RAM. But Chia farming is just a few sets of queries a minute. Less than 5% usage average i'm pretty sure. People tend to be obsessed with using SSDs for mining the plots but it's not necessary! I do think I am in the minority for using hard drives to plot.

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, danwat1234 said:

I went to clarify that, yes Chia mining is a 100% disk usage scenario, unless done within RAM. But Chia farming is just a few sets of queries a minute. Less than 5% usage average i'm pretty sure. People tend to be obsessed with using SSDs for mining the plots but it's not necessary! I do think I am in the minority for using hard drives to plot.

One of the wear concern for Chia is the power on hours and unload/load cycles. Really low tier HDDs have really bad unload/load cycle ratings of 150,000 and below where higher end NAS HDDs will be 600,000 and the enterprise disks have no defined maximum aka unlimited.

 

Personally I would plot only using HDDs as well, I have no desire to create SSD killing machines lol.

 

Either way an HDD used in a high demand backup workload environment will die much faster than from Chia.

[Vishera]

40 minutes ago, leadeater said:

One of the wear concern for Chia is the power on hours and unload/load cycles. Really low tier HDDs have really bad unload/load cycle ratings of 150,000 and below where higher end NAS HDDs will be 600,000 and the enterprise disks have no defined maximum aka unlimited.

Meanwhile my cheap hard drives have 55K power-on time and only 517 load/unload cycles each.

As for Reallocated Sectors Count, Reported Uncorrectable Errors, Command Timeout, Current Pending Sector Count and Uncorrectable Sector Count  - All of them are at 0 on all drives 

[froogers]

Did this video have a new editor or something, or was it just really rushed? I saw quite a lot of mistakes (The 25000 hour drives were more expensive than the 15000, Sentinel was misspelled, in the SMART scores, they listed Seagate as having no 187 or 188, when that said that it was WD that didn’t have them).