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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Need guidance, storage purchase imminent, limited budget. Recert / Refurb Drives (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by captaindongface@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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I need to reach a certain amount of space but have a limited budget. I saw these refurb drives on bargainhardware a while back and waited through BF to see if anything close to the £/TB came up. Unfortunately the UK doesn't seem to have seen any such deals.

My budget is limited, I also already have some older smaller drives that would form part of the array. I would likely be using unRAID with 2 of the purchased drives being Parity drives, or the same with SnapRAID. I feel that 2x Parity is neccessary to ensure that I can protect against inevitable failure, my current 4TB drives approach 5 years in use, and the refurb drives are between 3 and 5 years old according to the seller (datacentre use). If you feel you can suggest better alternatives or new drives that fit the bill please let me know. I feel that I would be unlikely to return a storage drive under warranty.

4x 10TB HGST HUH721010ALN600 £86.40 - £345.60. 20TB pool, approx 5 years usage.
3x 12TB WD HC520 HUH721212ALE601 £132 - £396. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), approx 3 years usage.
3x 12TB EMC Seagate ST12000NM005G £120 - £360. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), unknown time in use, Seagate?

I don't want to go above £400, I have a need for at least 10TB in the pool and in my mind 2 Parity drives is mitigating some of the risk with refurb drives. Am I going about this the wrong way?

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[–] Malossi167@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The key to keeping your data longterm is not RAID. raidisnotabackup.com Unless you run a critical server 2 drive parity with 3 total drives is total overkill.

If you are fine with a bit of downtime during recovery I would not bother with RAID at all if you only need a single drive to satisfy your storage needs. Only when you have multiple drives being able to resilver rather than restore is worth the premium. You might want to get a new drive as they do not cost that much extra and will likely live a fair bit longer so they do not cost anything extra in the long run. You might use some of those refurb drives for your backup server though.

[–] captaindongface@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have 4x 4TB drives that will be brought in (prior array), so this would eventually be 5-6 drives once the drives are in, with room to add more from there. Thank you for the advice, I'll see if I can get close with 1p new and a backup drives.

[–] captaindongface@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Out of interest, where are there new drives that cost not much more. When I look at retail in the UK, a 10TB drive is 3 times the cost of these 4-5 year used refurbs. If I could find something 0 -100% more I would likely go new.