General > General Technical Chat
eBay's purchase protection program doesn't really work!
DiTBho:
--- Quote from: thm_w on September 26, 2023, 11:18:48 pm ---Presumably most of the 500GB drives out there were produced a long time ago.
--- End quote ---
~2010
--- Quote ---25/09/2010:
qty=6, Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB, €44,90/each
qty=2, Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Intern 3-Bay, €65,90/each
...
--- End quote ---
I bought my first six Barracudas new in a physical store in 2010.
My first self-built NAS!!!
I was a university student at the time, almost graduated, spent all the scholarship to build a bloody complex thing made with three GNU/Linux embedded SBCs based on PPC in a matter that could very well become a story for Netflix, as it was so rich in twists, and it took almost 12 years to get it working properly! I redid everything, from the firmware, to various parts of the Linux kernel, to the entire rootfs, and today that thing is a war machine...
... even if ... it grinds no more than 20Mbytes/sec, node to node, but still at the low level it encrypts every disk in the pool in hardware!
Something that in 2010, no one, absolutely no one, thought they could do... today... both the Chinese and the Taiwanese will throw it into your head almost for free.
Those Barracudas have seen a lot of Linux history in the last 12 years, from kernel 2.6 to kernel 5.5 (sorry, no time for kernel 6.*) including thousands of kernel crashes, kernel panics, or, even worse, filesystems that have evaporated leaving only a shapeless mass of meaningless data in their place, so many bugs and problems with the PPC4xx platform.
Exactly what should never happen in a NAS, but it was never the fault of the disks. It was always the fault of the software, of uboot which didn't initialize the PCI well, and of the kernel which had big bugs under the hood.
And they survived! All the Barracudas are still in good shape, and perfectly working. They have always been housed in a self-ventilated Sharkoon 3-Bay box, and have never worked above 22C ambient temperature, physically hosted in the cellar, "my computer room", with various bags of salts that absorb humidity.
Hey, oh? So, respect for Barracudas 8)
DiTBho:
--- Quote ---13/06/2017:
qty=4, Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM, €54,90/each
qty=1, Icy Box IB-2226StS for 2x SATA 2.5", €35,90/each
--- End quote ---
This is my second purchase in the same physical shop, and these disks went into a commercial NAS RAID box that accepts SATA disks up to max 1TB and exports them to a SCSI interface.
I no longer found the same box, but recently, a few months ago, by pure luck on eBay I saw and bought the previous version on the fly, which instead accepts disks up to a max of 512GB
And that's why I got those 512GB Barracudas. I actually only needed 4, I took 8 to use the other 4 in a second project.
Even these 1TB Barracudas never had a single defect in 5 years of service!
If you say that the Hitachi are better, that's fine with me, I must have been just lucky with those disks, but then I need a precise reference, a model or something to look for :-//
vad:
The failure rate curve of hard drives typically exhibits a bathtub shape. All other things being equal (no bad blocks, no SMART errors), drives that have been sitting on a shelf unused for 13 years are likely less reliable than those with several thousand hours of use. This is due to the risks associated with child mortality, in my opinion.
I wouldn't buy used HDDs on eBay, but in this situation, there's no technical reason to keep drives with zero hours and return used ones.
Veteran68:
--- Quote from: DiTBho on September 26, 2023, 10:52:13 pm ---So Hitachi is the best.
Umm, which Hitachi model of 500Gb do you suggest?
NAS application.
--- End quote ---
Before I switched to QNAP NAS appliances close to a decade ago (which I love BTW), I built and ran my own dedicated NAS boxes on a Linux mdraid platform using external eSATA enclosures driven by multiport PCIe eSATA cards. My last such NAS had 16 external eSATA bays filled with 500GB Hitachi drives. Crazy that's only 8TB compared to today's drive sizes -- my current 6-bay QNAP NAS is filled with 14TB WD Gold datacenter drives. The 8-bay QNAP it replaced was filled with 3TB Toshiba drives.
Anyway, I just dug through my old HDD tote to see if I still had any of those 500GBs left. I did find one (there may be more, but most are 1TB or 3TB as I think I got rid of most of the 500GBs). These are the ones I used in my NAS. This was soon after IBM dumped all their HDD manufacturing to Hitachi and they still used the Deskstar branding.
vad:
--- Quote from: DiTBho on September 26, 2023, 10:52:13 pm ---So Hitachi is the best.
Umm, which Hitachi model of 500Gb do you suggest?
NAS application.
--- End quote ---
None.
Paying around 40 Euros per terabyte for those rusty 500GB Seagates is quite expensive.
Instead of using eight 500GB drives, you can opt for two 4TB WD Red Plus CMR drives, which would cost about 20 Euros per terabyte. These drives are brand new and come with a manufacturer's warranty.
If you plan to run the drives 24/7 in your NAS, you should also consider power consumption. HGST drives are power-hungry, idling at 5W or higher, whereas the WD40EFPX idles at 3.1W.
Eight HGST drives would consume 350 kWh per year, while two Red Plus drives would consume 54 kWh per year. I'm not sure about the efficiency of your NAS's PSU or your electricity costs, but saving 300-400 kWh or so per year would reduce your carbon footprint.
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