What are the rules of buying used storage?

Mr. Forager@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 38 points –

I am currently expanding my Homelab setup, and want to buy a 10TB drive, for media storage. It's a Seagate Ironwolf disk, so perfect for the job. But, it's second hand. It was originally bought in 2019, but stopped being used after 2022. Only used for static storage, it's been booted less than 50 times. I can get it for 1/3 of the original price.

What do you think? Are there any rules about buying used storage I should know about before buying it?

11

Original price doesn't matter, you need to compare it against current new offerings. A drive like that, I'd buy for 8-10€/TB at max. because current new HDD pricing is 15€/TB at the low end.

What you also need is SMART output. Watch out for high uncorrectable errors, writes and whatever. I'd never buy a drive without having seen its SMART data.

Ok nice, I'll ask for that before buying at least 👍 Thank you

Compare the SN number in the SMART output with the SN on the drive, they should be the same or else theseller showed you uncorrect SMART output or uncorrect drive.

Backup your data regularly and the risk should be very small.

I’m probably too paranoid to use someone else’s old storage media, but if I did I suppose I’d erase any existing partitioning, create a new partition (or multiple if you wanted them for some reason) and go to town.

Curious to hear if anyone has better best practices than that.

Firstly, I'd check if there are any firmware updates for the drive and install them. Then I'd run a full disk scan/diagnostics using the manufacturer's diag tools - eg Samsung has their HUTIL software, Seagate has Seatools etc. The scan should also pick up any bad sectors or other issues with the drive. Finally, I'd do a full wipe - either a DBAN single pass, or if I'm within Linux then I'd just write zeros using dd. Wiping the entire disk isn't really necessary, but I just feel like it gives me that "new drive" feeling - otherwise you'd be stepping over someone else's 1s and 0s, and that just feels gross.

One anecdotal data point to consider... They might be really loud.

I am running a few 3TB drives that were formerly enterprise SAN drives, cleaned and sold for cheap. They work just fine (we won't talk about game loading times here), but they are very audible clacking away when the head seeks.

Hitachi Ultrastar 7K4000 HUS724030ALE641 3TB 64MB cache Internal Hard Drive

dont: Used HDD are not worth the risk/cost as the chance of failure outside of warranty is too high. Maybe: Enterprise SSD's, sometimes you can find low ware SSDs that are cast off from enterprise organizations at reasonable prices, often more so if its used SAS as average consumers need an HBA to utilize the drive. Be cautious as some SSD's are discarded because of firmware bugs that cause early failures.