this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
8 points (78.6% liked)

Selfhosted

40313 readers
222 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I just browsed eBay a bit and saw that older, used SAS drives can be had pretty cheap - 30€ for 4TB, but of course rather old drives, sometimes 10 years old.

Now, I wouldn't expect ultra reliable, ultra fast, super cheap drives here. But this offer seems compelling, even buying a spare drive for higher redundancy would still be pretty cheap.

Question is: am I too optimistic here? Are these drives bound to fail within 3 months?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] RegalPotoo@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

It can be a super mixed bag - you can get lucky and end up with a drive that has spent it's entire life sitting on a shelf as a cold spare and was literally only powered up to be wiped so the recycler can say they wiped all the drives, or you can get a drive that has been running well over its MTBF and will fail start throwing SMART pre-fail warnings 30 seconds after your warranty expires

[–] Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is it easy to check that out when you have the drive?

Bought an ultra cheap (classic sata) 3TB drive for redundancy, haven't hooked it up yet though, but I mean what about some magic raid with a handfull if them for low usage like backup? Maybe some 512/1TB ssd as cache on top of it if it's used more than a backup? I mean I don't even know if that exists.

Sorry if it's a stupid question but I grew up well before 1GB drives hit the market :-)

[–] SniperFred@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is easy to get to these drive self reporting data, but reading it can be tricky.
For Windows there are GUI tools like https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/, that make all those values understandable even for people without much computer background.
For Linux the story is a bit different. Most current desktop environments do carry some functionality to read the S.M.A.R.T. data from the drives and display these data to the user. The user then has to find a way to interprete these seeminly random numbers. For things like the amound of written data to a drive (relevant for SSD) you have to pull out a calculator. Maybe there are also easily unterstandable GUI tools for Linux, I just haven't found them.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)