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HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hard
by cm2187 11mo ago
HDD have to be bought new, as well as anything mechanical (eg fans). But for motherboards, CPU, RAM and SSD, there is great value in buying used enterprise hardware on ebay. It is generally durable hardware that spent a quiet life in a temperature controlled datacentre, server motherboards from 5 years ago are absolute aircraft carriers in term of PCIe lanes and functionalities. Used enterprise SSDs are probably more durable than a new retail SSD, plus power loss protection and better performance.
The only downside is slightly higher power consumption. But just bought a 32 core 3rd gen Xeon CPU + motherboard, 128GB RAM, it idles at 75w without disks which isn't terrible. And you can build a more powerful NAS for a third of the price of a high end Synology. Unlikely that the additional 20-30w idle power consumption will cost you more than that.
- Helmut10001 11mo agoI wouldn't say that being new is an absolute requirement. I recently upgraded my ZFS pool from SATA to SAS HDDs. Since SAS HDDs have much better firmware for early error detection and monitoring, I decided to buy 50% refurbished. Even if I lost half of them, I would still be safe. I also have offsite backups. This setup worked really well for me, and I feel completely confident that my data is safe while not wasting unnecessary resources. Whether to use new or used equipment therefore depends on the setup.
- cm2187 11mo agoAgree, but that's taking a risk with your data (whereas if a MB fails, you likely just need to replace it but your data is fine), and HDD kind of have a finite number of hours in them. Where buying them used I think makes sense is for a backup server, that you leave off except the few hours in a week where you do an incremental backup. Then it doesn't really matter that the drives have already been running for 3 or 4 years.
- Helmut10001 11mo agoWith the redundancy in a raidz2 or mirror, the driver can and will fail. I count on this. But it can happen in a controlled manner.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo agoSo you buy used enterprise disks because their error detection is 'better'? Do you have any source for this claim? Why would be the firmware so different? Software is cheap i don't think they would be that different. I mean a used enterprise disk gets sold after it was running on heavy load for a long time. Any consumer hdd will have a lot less runtime than enterprise disks.
- Helmut10001 11mo agoThe protocol is better (SAS). Once I put them in, I immediately noticed transmission issues in a counter going up for several of my HDDs where the SATA showed no errors at all. It was a faulty backplane that introduced these transmission issues that went unnoticed by my SATA drives for several years.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo agoCould you elaborate? Did your HDDs then wrote broken data? Do you use ZFS? I think that should have indicated some HDD issues independent of a counter by transferspeed or something like this. Not that the backplane was just not good in handling SAS?
- Helmut10001 11mo agoYes, I am using ZFS (Raidz2), which is exactly why I know the data remained intact despite the transmission errors. Here is the breakdown of what happened during my recent migration 5 weeks ago and why the SAS protocol made the difference: > Did the HDDs write broken data? No. ZFS handles end-to-end data integrity via checksums. If the data had been corrupted during the transfer, ZFS would have flagged it as CKSUM errors in zpool status. Because ZFS validates the data after it crosses the wire, I could be confident that the data written to disk was valid, or the write would have been rejected/retried. However, ZFS did not notice any errors because the SATA/SAS firmware error correction were (still) able to handle this through repeated submission of signals. > SAS vs. SATA The issue was that my old backplane (BPN-SAS-743TQ) was electrically failing (signal degradation), but not dead yet. For years, my SATA drives likely engaged in silent retries or masked these marginal signal issues. I know I had issues for years, where I suspected bad cables (this had cost me $500 to replace several cables to try solving this). Standard SATA SMART attributes often only flag UDMA_CRC_Error_Count if things get very bad, but they are generally less verbose about link stability to the HBA. As soon as I plugged in the SAS drives, the mpt3sas driver and the drives themselves flooded dmesg and SMART logs with Invalid DWORD count errors. SAS has robust Physical Layer (PHY) error reporting. It wasn't waiting for data corruption. It was alerting me that the signal integrity on the way between the HBA and the drive was compromised. > Was the backplane just incompatible? No, it was physically faulty. I performed a standard isolation test: - I took a "suspect" SAS drive and moved it to a known-good bay -> No errors. - I took a known-good SAS drive and put it in the "suspect" bay -> Immediate errors. I did the same with the cables. During both tests (drives & cables), the errors stayed with the specific bays on the backplane. This proved the backplane was introducing signal noise on some bays. The SAS drives screamed about this noise immediately, whereas the SATA drives had been tolerating (and hiding) it. To sum up, ZFS kept the data safe (logical layer), but switching to SAS enterprise drives exposed a rotting hardware component (physical layer) that consumer SATA drives were ignoring. If I had been using a hardware RAID card with SATA, I likely wouldn't have known until a drive dropped offline entirely. I later read that backplanes do degrade regularly due to temperature stress etc. I put in a replacement backplane and all was solved.
- some-guy 11mo agoI have purchased many refurbished drives and have yet to have any failures from them. (Anecdotal obviously)
- nicolaslem 11mo ago75W idle is 650kWh a year, that's quite significant in the context of a home.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo ago260 Euros in Germany. And this heat also has to be moved out
- ls612 11mo agoWell that’s on you for living in the failed state of Germany, where power is 3-4x as expensive as it is in sensible countries like the US.
- Rebelgecko 11mo agoIt's frustrating when a comment is both needlessly belligerent flamebait AND wrong about electricity prices in the US. I guess that's what makes effective flamebait
- ls612 11mo agoGerman electricity prices are around €0.38/kwh based on my quick googling which is roughly $0.44/kwh. I pay $0.12-0.13/kwh in the US so I’m at least right factually up to rounding.
- else42 11mo agoWrong. I pay €0,23/kWh, so do your homework. What exactly is failing in Germany, and why is it important in this context?
- ls612 11mo agoThey have failed to have a sensible industrial and energy policy, leading to around net 0 GDP growth since 2019. I’m sure for the degrowth elites though this is not a failure it is working as intended.
- pmontra 11mo agoMaybe 75 W without disk is not terrible but it's not good. My unoptimized ARM servers idle at about 3 or 4 W and add another 1 or 10 W when their SSDs or HDDs are switched on. 75 W probably need active cooling. 4 W do not. Anyway you can probably do many more things with that 75 W server.
- cm2187 11mo agoA raspberry pi will go even lower. But as you say, not really comparable in term of functionality. I am comparing this to high end consumer NAS, which will idle at 30-40w minimum.
- Glemkloksdjf 11mo agoEnterprise hardware is very seldom a good idea. The hardware has different form factors (19"), two power supplies, very loud, very power hungry. There are so many good combinations of old and still functional hardware for consumers. My main pc 6 years ago had a powerful cpu and idle load of 15 watts due to the combination of mainboard and amount of components i had in it (one ram block instead of 2 or so). And often enough, if you can buy enterpsire hardware, the hardware is so outdated that a current consumer system would beat it without looking at it. If you then need to replace something, its hard to find or its differennt like the power supply.
- gorbachev 11mo agoThe datahoarder community frequently utilizes used hard drives. That's perfectly fine, if your NAS has redundancy and you can recover from 1 - 2 disk failures, and you're buying the drives from a reputable reseller.
- t-3 11mo agoI usually buy used hard drives, but prices are strange for all electronics right now. It's a bad time to buy anything computer-related, but especially used goods which aren't discounted as much as normal are priced higher due to massive inflation (to the point that refurbished drives I bought 5 years ago have a better dollar/GB ratio than refurbs I can buy today).