I need to reach a certain amount of space but have a limited budget. I saw these refurb drives on bargainhardware a while back and waited through BF to see if anything close to the £/TB came up. Unfortunately the UK doesn’t seem to have seen any such deals.
My budget is limited, I also already have some older smaller drives that would form part of the array. I would likely be using unRAID with 2 of the purchased drives being Parity drives, or the same with SnapRAID. I feel that 2x Parity is neccessary to ensure that I can protect against inevitable failure, my current 4TB drives approach 5 years in use, and the refurb drives are between 3 and 5 years old according to the seller (datacentre use). If you feel you can suggest better alternatives or new drives that fit the bill please let me know. I feel that I would be unlikely to return a storage drive under warranty.
- 4x 10TB HGST HUH721010ALN600 £86.40 - £345.60. 20TB pool, approx 5 years usage.
- 3x 12TB WD HC520 HUH721212ALE601 £132 - £396. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), approx 3 years usage.
- 3x 12TB EMC Seagate ST12000NM005G £120 - £360. 12TB pool (higher parity ceiling), unknown time in use, Seagate?
I don’t want to go above £400, I have a need for at least 10TB in the pool and in my mind 2 Parity drives is mitigating some of the risk with refurb drives. Am I going about this the wrong way?
The key to keeping your data longterm is not RAID. raidisnotabackup.com Unless you run a critical server 2 drive parity with 3 total drives is total overkill.
If you are fine with a bit of downtime during recovery I would not bother with RAID at all if you only need a single drive to satisfy your storage needs. Only when you have multiple drives being able to resilver rather than restore is worth the premium. You might want to get a new drive as they do not cost that much extra and will likely live a fair bit longer so they do not cost anything extra in the long run. You might use some of those refurb drives for your backup server though.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have 4x 4TB drives that will be brought in (prior array), so this would eventually be 5-6 drives once the drives are in, with room to add more from there. Thank you for the advice, I’ll see if I can get close with 1p new and a backup drives.
Out of interest, where are there new drives that cost not much more. When I look at retail in the UK, a 10TB drive is 3 times the cost of these 4-5 year used refurbs. If I could find something 0 -100% more I would likely go new.