we've told you this so many times buying used hard drives is not worth risking
your data but sometimes
offer you just cannot refuse we took that risk and bought eight used hard
drives from eBay totaling 136 terabytes for two thousand dollars
that's almost half the price compared to new really impressive savings but just
like buying a used GPU on eBay there's a real chance that new to you high
capacity hard drives were used for crypto mining so is even this great deal
worth it if there's a chance your parts arrive with one foot already in the
grave I'll tell you where and why these drives are popping up for sale what red
flags to look out for and when you should consider making an exception to
the don't buy used hard drives rule right after I tell you how to make an
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all right the shameful truth is this
isn't even the first time we've bought you storage my personal hard drives are
from a dead Nas and are currently Dying Years Ago Linus splurged on 24 used ssds
for a server at home but the only reason he was comfortable taking that risk was
that he had been reassured by another buyer the ssds were in good health so he
bought them this time though we don't have that luxury but what we do have are
some very attractive prices two hundred dollars for 16 terabytes when the
cheapest new drive with the same capacity would be in the neighborhood of
300 so why are they so cheap supply and
demand wow a huge volume of drives are
being dumped on eBay Marketplace and the like some from Everyday People some that
were refurbished and some from unscrupulous users that use the hard
drive to mine cryptocurrencies
but how much does that hurt them well
there are many coins you can mine on a hard drive today we tried it in the past
the most popular by far is chia mining
it was so popular at launch in May 2021 that Seagate was even considering making
an entire line of cryptocurrency specific hard drives sure anyway Chia
mind hard drives should be pretty safe to buy since Chia runs on a proof of
space algorithm so once the drives are filled with the plot data from Chia to
prove the space or capacity very little read or write activity is required while
mining that space on the drive that means that drives used in Chia mining
are barely used which is enough justification for us to roll the dice on
eBay we settled on two 16 terabyte WD
UltraStar HC 5500s two 16 terabyte
Seagate XO 16x's that one yeah this one
right here and four 18 terabyte
and now they're here let's compare what was advertised with what we actually got
our two WDS were listed with up to 2100
hours of power on yeah not so much we got drives with 2300
and 2600 hours a bit above the stated value but in the grand scheme of things
those extra 10 or 20 days of power on time aren't really a big deal on the
flip side the seagates were expected to arrive with up to 11
000 power on hours and instead they just had like 234 213 hours damn score but
still is that a lot or a little in the Enterprise world the expected lifetime
is around 45 000 hours but anecdotally some of our
staff have drives with 50 to 60 000 hours ultimately it's hard to say when a
drive is too old to use higher hour
drives are typically cheaper but they also might not last as long only you can
decide if it's worth it for your needs but we'd recommend 20 maybe 25
000 hours as a safe ceiling lastly our
four Toshiba drives the packaging just speaks for itself this is what our other
drives came in uh you can see here ESD bags this foam hold your hard drives in
and this is how the Toshiba has arrived not great for mechanical devices with
moving Parts like just look at the SATA connectors on this one
I noticed that the corner is just completely passionate on this one oh
it's just actually broken fantastic a quick sound check on the
Toshibas tells us the other drives were damaged as well
huge bummer unfortunately this buyer didn't accept our returns but no matter
the buyer protection on eBay is excellent and we're able to use the
money back guarantee to get our cash back but physical condition and Power on
hours aren't the only way to diagnose our drives it's time to pull the rest of
the smart data thanks to the cloud backup and storage systems experts at
backblaze we know that some parameters are better indicator of failures than
others the combination of attributes 5187 188 and 197 and 198 can accurately
predict an impending drive failure 76.7 percent of the time and how did our
other drives fare flying colors it's
golf rules and we have zeros across the board or at least as far as we could
tell see every Drive manufacturer has different ideas about which of the many
specific smart attributes they should monitor Seagate gave us all five while
neither WD or Toshiba include 187 and
188 one blemish though was that despite its low power cycle and on hours count
attribute 199 on one of our Seagate exos
drives was flagged as concerning this rather nebulous error count increases
when there are infinitesimally short drops in communication between the
controller on the hard drive and the SATA controller on the motherboard
during a data transfer operation these drops are almost exclusively caused by
things like a bad or lucida connection or a faulty SATA controller on the host
system so ultimately they're safe to ignore so long as they aren't
reoccurring and if you confirmed the cabling and the controller are both good
the final thing we can glean from our smart data is the evidence of crypto
mining farming whatever we're looking at threes specific signs high power on
hours are relatively low number of total reads compared to those power on hours
and a total right amount that is roughly equal to the size of the drive although
that's no guarantee with a quick conversion and a little math we can see
our Seagate drives have a total reads and writes that are staggeringly high
given their 250 ish power on hours it's
also roughly twice their capacity which according to our friend Wendell from
level one text could be due to one of the Integrity checks that might run
while refurbishing a truck and lo and behold they've been etched to say they
are recertified weird since there was nothing about that in the listing
oh well we can only speculate on their
history but it's possible these are gray Market drives from a batch of drives
that had their tilt indicators tripped during shipping or were sent back as an
open box return drive failure is mostly
common when a drive is new they may be DOA or fail within a couple days of use
so these drives could have been through all of that before being recertified and
then sold to us checking the Seagate website for warranties has both drives
report back not warranted by Seagate which in theory means that the
recertifying company offers an alternative warranty and this 30-day
seller warranty is exactly that 30 days isn't quite the five years that Seagate
offers from authorized sellers but it's a heck of a lot more than zero days plus
they are WD drives continued their trend of ignoring useful features and chose
not to log total reads and writes thanks WD this makes it difficult for us to
even speculate on their history but at only a hundred or so days of power on
time it seems unlikely they are part of a farm because having their patience to
allow those rewards to slowly accumulate is essential for returning a profit
especially when Factory in upfront costs and power consumption and you should
factor in the power you feel with a screwdriver from lttstore.com
they're actually very good now it's time to do something with these drives seeing
as we have this much storage on hand let's do it to make just a janky DIY Nas
and compare its price to an off-the-shelf pre-built Mass the key
night among you may have already knows though that we paid more for our 16
terabyte drives than our eight teams so it seems like a good time to note that
we had some time constraints that prevented us from getting the absolute
best bang for a buck on the hard drive namely we wanted to get a variety of
different drives from different Sellers and they had to be able to ship it to us
up in Canada further limiting our choices our best deal was easily the
recertified Seagate drives that came with an 80 Gigabyte per dollar compared
to 50 to 55 gigabytes per dollar brand new that's two used drives for the price
of one and a half brand new and if you happen to need a drive we'll have the
links for both new and used down in the description
oh here we go oh wow that's heavy good old steel chassis assuming we converted
our trustial 69 gaming PC into an ass
and assuming we loaded it with these 16 terabyte seagates which ideally within
the toshiba's if they worked and then you factor in some money for cables and
a hard drive cage we are sitting right around 71 gigabytes per dollar meanwhile
a pre-configured Nas with that much storage space comes in at
1622 meaning 39.5 gigabytes per dollar
what could you do with that extra 720
how about buying another three full hard drives or building a whole other PC not
to mention that the 69 PC can still do all the normal things you expect a PC to
do while a dedicated Nas has a singular purpose but it's not just about spending
Less on your Nas project you can also afford to buy more drives that you can
dedicate to parity for example choosing to go with raid 5 instead of raid 1.
those used drives may be less reliable overall but at some point the extra
redundancy makes it the safer move but there's a few things we haven't touched
on so far with this price discussion sales on new hard drives and shocking
shocking hard drives involves buying a drive generally intended to be used
externally and removing all the unnecessary bits to just get to the 3.5
inch hard drive inside as an example you
could pick up one of these 18 terabyte external WD My Books brand new for 280
per Drive meaning 64 gigabytes per
dollar substantially closer to the cost of a used Drive than to the cost of one
that was intended to be used internal all along as for sales on new drives
this is essentially a matter of patience
we've seen the price of a brand new 18 terabyte drive fall as low as 300 a new
16 terabyte drives have gone on sale for 245. again not as cheap as used but it's
got a lot of benefits like a full warranty known history and zero power on
hours with all that said though can I ultimately recommend using used hard
drives it's all going to come down to just your personal Comfort level with
risk if you are storing something easily replaceable like Steam games or media
files you might be pretty excited to get a bunch of capacity or redundancy for
the same amount of money but if you're storing family photos or important
documents well those are worth a heck of a lot more than a game save to most
people and also just use steam Cloud saves and knowing they're on a new Drive
might help you feel more at ease regardless of what drives you end up
with you should have a good one two three backup strategy in place things
three copies of your data on two separate mediums with one stored off
site I personally prefer the one one one
one drive already failing one location
s about risk aren't something we can answer for you it's up to each
individual to decide on their own but for our part yeah it's kind of worth the
risk we've definitely had a bunch of change of opinion on used drives and
we'll be considering them in future want to build calls for the most terabytes
for our dollars just like how this video calls for the most segue to our sponsor
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watching this video I might have been a little bit deeper than we thought at
first but if you enjoyed this video maybe you want to look at the last time
you built a tiny nest with a hundred terabytes of space sure wish that we
bought some used drops for that one have a great day