Where to find used HDDs that haven't been chia'd?
The project I'm working on is requiring a lot more data storage space than expected. As in, a lot more space. Since the data is temporary, I'm hoping to get some used SATA compatible hdds that are inexpensive. I just don't want to get drives that have been used for chia mining. I've checked eBay -- but most sellers don't have a good history of their drives listed. Does anyone know of a reputable place to get decommissioned equipment?
(edit, sorry, this ended up in the wrong place)
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I heard good things from https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/ you may have a look at them.
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HDD's aren't destroyed, damaged, or even impacted by Chia. HDD's are usually ok to buy used as long as they have low power on hours.
Chia destroyed SSD's and NVMe's because of the high amount of reads/writes that are required to make a "plot" (which then gets moved to HDD).
So, you should be good to go as long as you stay away from buying used SSD's.
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It's usually environmental factors that kill HDDs, extreme temperatures, constant temperature fluctuation or vibration being the most obvious. In my limited experience, drives that are powered on, well cooled, and in constant use, fail more gracefully and last longer than occasionally used drives in a poorly cooled enclosure. So it's always a gamble.
At the end of a day, brand new drives do fail, you need backup/redundancy for important data regardless, so the reliability issue comes down to a trade off of price vs. the aggravation of loss recovery.
Just buy from local people in your neighborhood and you'll be okay.
Be aware that SMART data can be wiped/overwritten/falsified and some shady merchants do that in order to make their drives look better.
Get a cheap SAS2 HBA; used SAS drives are cheaper than SATA. 8TB/10TB for as low as $6/TB from RhinoTech, OceanTech, and others.
LSI SAS2008-based cards (9211, M1015, H200, etc.) or 2308-based (9207, 2208) flashed to IT mode, or Adaptec 7805 (and just flip to HBA mode in fw config).
Are the savings that significant? I'd be really wary of 2nd hand drives. Without a chunky raid setup I'd rather not...
As seanho said the price for used sas drives is fairly low. I was looking at ~$25 for 4tb SAS drives.
I did actually think about getting a card to use the SAS drives. I think I'd rather buy a used server with a bunch of bays - a local recycler actually has some that appear decently priced but they have weird hours. I went to call them at 3:30 this afternoon and they were already closed for the weekend.
Also some drives wrap round at 65536 hours.
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Spinners still generally follow the bathtub curve, and heat / vibration is a bigger killer than just use. I have many drives with 30-50k hrs power-on time, but only 1-2 drive writes total. In other words, they've been spinning constantly but rarely used; this is very common for enterprise usage.
I have had used SAS drives fail; I have also had new SATA drives fail. Nowadays, I tend to buy drives in smaller lots of 2-4 at a time; once I had three drives from the same lot fail within a week of each other. RAID et al. are for continuity (reducing downtime); 3-2-1 backups are for disaster recovery.
Chia doesn't impact HDDs really at all.
Vibration, heat are the typical big killers.
Drives less than 6months old tend to fail as often as drives 3-4 year old. It looks like (do not have hard data) that once drives are past 4 years they are almost immortal, very very few failures unless environment changes.
But that is a feeling, not hard fact. Our oldest drives still in production has been running for about a decade now, and we don't see any failures with them. About to retire the last of them soon tho.
Count for 3% annual failure rate for all drives (typical is much less, more like 1%) AND when buying used drives account for guaranteed 10% DOA/within 6months dead, then normal failure rate.
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where does rhinotech and oceantech sell their wares? Want to take a looksie on their stock
Ocean-Tech on ebay: https://www.ebay.com/str/oceantech/Drives-Storage-Blank-Media/_i.html?_sacat=165 (not very competitive offers)
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Unlike SSD, me doesn't think Chit will do anything bad to HDDs. If anything, it proves that it's not gonna die.
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I'm a mod at ServerBuilds.net, and both sellers have posted deals for our community. OceanTech has a rep on our Discord; higher-capacity drives are in high demand, but I know they have over a thousand 2TB/3TB SAS spinners, and multiple thousands of smaller 10k SAS, and a ton of stuff they haven't gotten around to listing on eBay. Rhino has a current deal for $50/8TB and $80/10TB HGST SAS (with PI that can be erased with
sg_format); see our Discord for details. Not shilling for SB.net; if you want to bypass us and work directly with either of those sellers, I'm sure they'd be open to negotiation.I looked at one of the guides on your site. I have an old tower with an old AM3+ motherboard installed. I am wondering if you can tell me if It is worth picking up one of the SAS controllers listed on the guide and using the tower base for a NAS or would you recommend a newer system?