i have recently built a ZFS array for long term storage, i bought some refurbished drives from ebay from server part deals. Ive seen online alot of people happy with there referb drives so i pulled the trigger on 3 drives. After about a week they arived packed well and were all labeled from 2017. I think thats kinda old, but i guess if its a enterprise grade drive it should matter its got 61655 hours on it. well i was at work and got a fun little notification from notify. and it said dev/sdd was unplugged. I thought that was weird but maybe it was a bug, so on my lunch break i ssh’d into my computer. and it said the same no /dev/sdd. I thought something quirky may have happend like the drive cage rattled and unpluged the drive. either way i wasnt worried because i have a Z2 array for my hardives. but when i got home the drive wouldnt show up on my main rig or laptop. and it makes gravely noises.
i contacted the seller about getting a replacement drive as its under the 90 day warrenty. What are your experiences/recommendations for hardrives?
Probably wouldn’t buy a 2017 drive in 2025. I’ve retired almost all of my 2018-2019 used drives at this point.
@Coldmoon @Steamymoomilk I mean, a few months ago I bought a 10TB used HGST drive from 2018 (from goharddrive). The bigger issue imo is buying a drive that old and having only a 90 day warranty. The 10TB drive I purchased came with a 5yr warranty.
Personally my threshold for “probably too old” is 40k hours, but if they show very few start/stops and they test out, they’ll probably be fine.
But failures can happen at any time, even right from the factory. Just get the replacement. You should always be prepared to replace drives, if you want high uptime and low data loss.
If the ebay seller is the same as https://serverpartsdeals.com/ then they’re great and have good standing in the community from what I can see. Contact them and get a replacement. This kind of thing happens with used drives.
This is the way. It’s always a risk buying used drives, and everything I’ve seen and heard about them has been good news so I expect OP getting a replacement should be pretty easy.
