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Comment by cjaackie | Hacker News Reader

They mentioned the cluster being used enterprise drives, I can see the desire to save money but agree, that is going to be one expensive mistake down the road.

I should also note personally for home cluster use, I learned quickly that used drives didn’t seem to make sense. Too much performance variability.

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If I remember correctly, most drives either:

1. Fail in the first X amount of time

2. Fail towards the end of their rated lifespan

So buying used drives doesn't seem like the worst idea to me. You've already filtered out the drivers that would fail early.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about

we don't have perfect metrics here but this seems to match our experience; a lot of failures happened shortly after install before the bulk of the data download onto the heap, so actual data loss is lower than hardware failure rates

Where did you source them? I've thought about buying HDDs from a vendor like serverpartdeals.com but was unsure how reliable the drives would be.

Over in hardware-land we call this "the bathtub curve".

Used drives make sense if maintaining your home server is a hobby. It's fun to diagnose and solve problem in home servers, and failing drives give me a reason to work on the server. (I'm only half-joking, it's kind of fun)

in a datacenter context failure rates are just a remote-hands recurring cost so it's not too bad with front-loaders

e.g. have someone show up to the datacenter with a grocery list of slot indices and a cart of fresh drives every few months.

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