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Comment by Scene_Cast2 | Hacker News Reader

Where do you buy your drives? Last time I was in the market, I couldn't find a reputable seller selling the exact models in the report. I'm afraid that the less reputable sellers (random 3rd party sellers on Amazon) are selling refurbished drives.

I ended up buying a similar sounding but not same model from CDW.

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These are useful data points, but I've found that at my risk tolerance level, I get a lot more TB/$ buying refurbished drives. Amazon has a couple of sellers that specialize in server pulls from datacenters, even after 3 years of minimal use, the vendors provide 5 years of additional warranty to you.

Buying refurbished also makes it much easier to avoid having the same brand/model/batch/uptime, for firmware and hardware issues. I do carefully test for bad sectors and verify capacity, just in case.

> even after 3 years of minimal use, the vendors provide 5 years of additional warranty to you.

The Amazon refurb drives (in this class) typically come with 40k-43k hours of data center use. Generally they're well used for 4½-5yrs. Price is ~30% of new.

I think refurb DC drives have their place (replaceable data). I've bought them - but I followed other buyers' steps to maximize my odds.

I chose my model (of HGST) carefully, put it thru an intensive 24h test and check smart stats afterward.

As far as the 5yr warranty goes, it's from the seller and they don't all stick around for 5 years. But they are around for a while -> heavy test that drive after purchase.

I think you're better off buying used and using the savings for either mirroring or off-site backup. I'd take two mirrored used drives from different vendors over one new drive any day.

There was a Backblaze report a while ago that said, essentially, that most individual drives are either immediate lemons or run to warranty.

If you buy used, you're avoiding the first form of failure.

A lot of those resellers do not disclose that the drive isn't new, even labeling the item as new.

GoHardDrive is notorious for selling "new" drives with years of power on time. Neither Newegg nor Amazon seem to do anything about those sellers

Indeed- RAID used to stand for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. The point was to throw a bunch of disks together and with redundancy it didn't matter how unreliable they were. Using blingy drives w/ RAID feels counter-intuitive- at least as a hobbyist.

Refurbed drives have a MUCH HIGHER failure rate. I used to send back lots of drives to Seagate, they come back with the service sticker and that means trouble. YMMV

These generally aren't refurbed drives, they are used drives that sat in a datacenter for 3-5 years.

Any specific sellers you'd recommend?

In europe lambda tek is my goto for enterprise hardware as a retail customer.

Lots of good options here: https://diskprices.com/

Note that they list at least one vendor as selling "New" drives when they are not even close to being new.

It's definitely scraped with a few simple queries and not moderated by a human, you have to manually check before buying of course. It just saves a few minutes of time automating the initial search.

I think there will eventually be a false advertising lawsuit or some regulatory action against Amazon about this. Until that happens, it’s hard to say for certain which items are used.

To save going down this rabbit hole again :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262314

>https://listofdisks.com/ https://www.cpuscout.com/ https://diskprices.com/ https://gpuprices.us/ https://instances.vantage.sh/ https://tvpricesindex.com/

And for stuff like this, many companies will have an approved vendor, and you have to buy what they offer or go through a justification for an exception.

B&H has quite a few

I guess it isn’t that surprising given the path the development took, but it is always funny to me that one of the most reputable consumer tech companies is a photography place.

Similar to how the most popular online retailer is a bookstore. Successful businesses are able to expand and I wish B&H the best of luck on that path, we need more companies like them.

I'd rather companies stick to one thing and do it well, rather than expand into every industry out there and slowly creep into every facet of society.

Like that bookstore that just happens to retail some stuff too.

B&H seems to be pretty focused on techy things (and cameras of all sorts have always been techy things, though that corner of the tech market that has been declining for a long time now).

When they branch out to selling everything including fresh vegetables, motor oil, and computing services, then maybe they might be more comparable to the overgrown bookstore.

I definitely learn towards B&H for electronic things. It’s quite a bit less “internet flea market” that Amazon often is.

AWB&H alone is a Fortune 500 company

There used to be a much more distinct camera—and all rhe ancillary gear and consumables than there used to be. Though B&H still sells a ton of lighting and audio gear as well as printers and consumables for same.

They sell other stuff too but they’re still pretty photo and video-centric, laptops notwithstanding.

I buy most, but not all, of my tech at B&H and have now for more than a decade. Especially peripherals.

What's the risk of buying Amazon & running a SMART/crystaldisk test?

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