vegetaAI blamed again as hard drives are sold out for this year
Buy used
Wild that people were down voting you. Hard drives can last decades and are replaced from enterprise servers long before they’re close to failing.
Especially with lowered use compared to a server, you won’t see much functional difference between brand new consumer grade and used server grade.
Pretty sure caches and everything are better on used server grade still anyways.
For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise…
However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it.
It’s honestly not even worth trying to use the right terminology these days…
Every seller/manufacturer uses slightly different definitions.
So to clarify, what’s good is:
A product that was sent back to manufacturer and “manufacturer refurbished” meaning that common fail points were inspected and repaired even if a failure would be emmenient but it’s still working
Pretty much anything else, would be bad.
An example of what is bad is:
“Amazon/ebay refurbished” where someone may have wiped the dust off and possibly checked to see if it turned on.
Especially for hard drives, the refurbishing is built into the purchase contract of the new drives. And since the purchaser and manufacturer both understand the refresh is proactive and the old drives still have life in them, it knocks off a percentage on the new drives and that’s where we can find deals.
I think I’ve got a 1TB that’s ~20 years old I got that way. It’s still technically in my main PC, but at this point it’s an important archive drive that just doesn’t get read or wrote very often.
I’ve just literally never had a HDD or SD die tho. I don’t know why people act like they’re disposable parts of a PC still.
My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base
Yeah, it’s just typical capitalism stuff.
People see talk about legit refurbs and then think a dust wipe refurb isnthe same thing and get ripped off.
I think people are downvoting because this statement of “buy used” simplifies things to kinda put it on people who want to purchase drives and aren’t data center customers. HONESTLY, even buying used hardware, you’re going to be seeing a spike in prices because available stock is going to be what it is and the demand is only going to grow.
Also, buying used for something you want to protect your data is ALWAYS going to be a risky proposition, even if HDD tech and improved and become stupid reliable.
ALSO ALSO, there are scammers everywhere. When you buy used, you take a higher risk of the seller shipping a box of rocks.
ALSO ALSO ALSO, you don’t actually know what a drive’s been through until you get it.
… And we can keep going but the point is offering a simplistic solution to a big structural problem like the supply chain and corporate greed running amok is just pointing the finger at consumers when, at the end of the day, they didn’t start this mess.
I downvoted because look at serverpartdeals, the stock is horrific and what little is in stock is absurdly expensive
Yeah I’d imagine you’d have trouble finding a good deal there. I’ve had way more luck getting drives from eBay, thrift shops, yard sales and the local dump.
Also, by convincing everyone I know to just give me their old stuff that they think is no longer useful. They don’t want it taking up space anyway, and I get to harvest the useful bits and add them to my frankensteined home lab, then responsibly dispose of the rest. There have also been several machines I’ve acquired this way that I’ve repaired/made whole again, then provided to those who need them.
Everyone IS so there’s a run on those also.