Did decide to go the used drive route just saving up and waiting for the right deal from a good seller. I did notice on eBay specifically that some sellers have tested drives for a great price per tb with a shit seller’s warranty (30 days to 1 year) but offer insurance for a significantly longer length of time for a few more bucks. I’m wondering if that’s a good alternative to having a long seller’s warranty? Just assume I will back everything up properly so drive failure won’t be a massive concern I just want the option of returning it or getting a replacement if need be.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    10 months ago

    Yes and no.

    If you put the effort in to get a wide range of sources/batches AND monitor your disks regularly: Agreed

    But if you get a few from the same manufacturing batch/source? Then there are shockingly decent odds that they will fail at roughly the same time. Which is a huge problem if you aren’t monitoring your disks and able to “recover” from however many failures before they take down the array.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Yeah.

        I guess my general approach in my personal life is that I would rather spend a bit more on some refurbs of server grade hdds from a reputable outlet. Because once I start assuming all of my drives will fail at any moment I need much more hierarchical storage and a lot more replacement drives and so forth. And my actual off site backups are a much smaller subset of my data that is in an encrypted volume in a cloud storage provider’s bucket.

        And in my professional life: You are paying for the warranties and support contracts. If you can’t afford to run your own storage then you should just call Amazon and ask for a good deal.