Best place to buy server hardware

Mixel@feddit.de to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 44 points –

Hey, I recently saw a comment on where to buy server hardware (mainly hard drives) sadly I forgot about the URL and didn't save it. What are you guys favourite places to buy these kind of things? :D

EDIT: I should've said for the EU would be heavily preferable since I live in Germany, sorry for the confusion :/

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It was probably me. I use these two places + eBay primarily but I'm sure there are other good ones out there.

Edit: also for posterity this is a cool site but shucking drives hasn't been viable for a long time as far as I've seen: https://shucks.top/

Yeah I think I remember thank you 😅 I just noticed are these also valid options for Germany or should I go with my usual places to hard drives of? Anyway thank you for your comment :)

I'm not sure what's around for Germany, sorry. You may be able to use eBay to find local sellers cross-posting from their normal website?

That's a good idea. When I'm gonna look should I scout for new ones or can I look for already used once? Also how many should I buy 2 for a raid 1 or 3 or something to use a raid 5/10

I prefer recertified ones if they're significantly cheaper, but that's up to you. Recertified will likely fail faster but when they're close to ~60% of the cost it makes sense to gamble.

As for which RAID that is up to you and how you're setting up your array. If you're running ZFS then mirrored pairs are somewhat flexible since you can add a pair whenever you want of any size disks, but they will cost you 50% of your disk space in redundancy. For RAID5/6 you want the disk sizes to match and for ZFS you won't be able to add any disks to a RAID5/6 array for about a year - the code that adds that feature is coming in the next release which will take about a year.

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To back off your post, does anyone have one for Australia?

And Germany, maybe? Or at least EU.

Oh fuck yeah I should have said that I live in Germany.... Thank you for your comment

Hey, if you would like, I buy from serverpartdeals all the time, I can be a shipping proxy for you since I have access to both US and DE mailing systems.

Bought 160TB from them about a year ago.

Appreciate the offer. I recently only build my home server and I just started to selfhost things Although I am looking on what to expand and when I dont think I will buy Hard drives or something else in the next 2 months for my server

No worries. My offer will still stand. I want to help others into this addiction.

Appreciate it 😂 love it already

Serverpartdeals is good. https://www.goharddrive.com/ is another option. Generally slightly more expensive than serverpartdeals, but with better warranty. Both are reputable options

I had a terrible experience with them. They are selling drives that previously failed in the data center, but currently pass manufacturer tests. They also wipe SMART. Or at least, they usually do. That's how I know the first part. I had 4/3 drives fail on me- all of the original set within my burn-in tests, and 1 replacement (before I returned the others for refund) a year later. The last one was clearly meant to be wiped, but had the error still in the SMART logs.

They did have good customer service at least, but the parts are unreliable garbage that should not be trusted.

They are decommisioned datacenter drives, this could be for a variety of reasons (including errors). There are many discussions online about them wiping smart data.

It depends on your use case, I have a few of their drives in a nas specifically for media. I received one bad drive that failed my burn in tests, which they exchange without issue. All of my important files are stored on a seporate ssd based store.

All depends on your risk tolerence and needs.