[ale] Refurbished HDDs

[Bob Toxen]

It's been my experience that high quality disks, such as the Western
Digital Caviar series, will last 5 years and should be replaced at
that time!!!  I find most other brands to be suboptimal, e.g., expect
a head crash and catastrophic loss of all data.  The Caviar Black disks
spin at 7200 RPM and carry a 5 year warranty!

I've had poor luck with Seagate.  YMMV.

I realize that a RAID array is redundant but is it worth being cheap to
hopefully replace every failed disk before another one also fails?

Understand that the MTBF is less than that for one disk increased by
being able to continue until two disks fail.  This is because, assuming
all disks of the same type and time in service are more likely to fail
around the same time, same as incandescent light bulbs.

I suggest, if you use refurbished disks, pick a RAID mode, such as RAID6,
with double redundancy due to two different parities that can withstand
two disk failures in the array.

Wikipedia's "RAID" entry is excellent.

If the cost isn't out of your pocket buy new WD Black!

Bob

[Bob's political comment suppressed by Bob]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2026 at 06:25:39PM -0800, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Anyone have recommendations for an online place to buy refurbished HDDs (not
> SSDs)? I want to add a few more drives to the NAS.