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Where to buy server replacement hdd to match existing RAID configured drives?

I have a Dell Poweredge r720xd in RAID10. I’ve had a couple of drives fail since I’ve bought it and was able to buy cheap replacements on ebay.

I had another drive fail recently and one of the spare ebay drives came up as “blocked”. It put me out a few days while I waited for a new one to arrive; also from ebay.

I’d like to avoid getting another dud drive. Are there any reputable resellers of these old drives so I can stock up on some spares?

brygphilomena ,

Servermonkey.com

Harddrivesdirect.com

Unixsurplus.com

Techmikeny.com

I’ve used all these sites before for used parts/servers

AbidanYre ,

Flash the raid controller and don’t worry about oem drives.

forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/guide-f…

Grippler ,

I bought a couple of 12tb “used” drives from servershop24.de, thay all had less than 150h of runtime.

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 11th Jul 2024, 03:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Shdwdrgn ,

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.

code ,

Serverpartdeals.com

Factory refurbs. I have 3 nas boxes full of drives from there. No issues

Shdwdrgn ,

I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.

talentedkiwi ,

Someone more knowledge than me can correct me, but I’m pretty sure you could buy a newer bigger drive to replace an older drive. You obviously wouldn’t get the full capacity as it would be limited by the other older slower drives. However, you would get a, theoretically, more reliable drive than a random one on eBay. Then as you replace older drives eventually you could have increased size.

Caveat is that it will put stress on the old drive to rebuild, however you’d get that with any drive you put in. General wisdom I saw says to replace all the drives. Although that can be expensive.

I’m any case make sure you have a backup before you do any of the changes.

brownmustardminion OP ,

Damn I wish I would’ve known sooner. Isn’t there a concern of not matching the same drive similar to how you can’t mix and match RAM sticks?

talentedkiwi ,

Not that I’m aware of, but I’m not as knowledgeable as someone else. I’m hoping some quick research or someone better can help. If I remember I can look later on this evening, but can’t at the moment.

poVoq ,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

This really depends on your exact setup and might not be true for hardware raid.

Generally speaking, I would look into replacing that ageing raid with something more modern like Btrfs or ZFS where you are significantly more flexible with the drives used.

raldone01 ,

I think mixing RAM sticks is mostly fine today. Maybe you won’t get 100% performance but I don’t think it will be very noticeable. You may still run into issues with some capacity combinations depending on the mainboard/cpu. Regarding clock speeds usually all run on the clock of the slowest one.

Matching RAM latency also matters for performance.

When using different capacity RAM channels matter so take care on the order of population.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

You absolutely can mix and match RAM sticks, as long as their specs are the same. It’s not necessarily recommended as there might be compatibility issues, but usually ends up working just fine.

MNByChoice ,

I have not had an issue mixing and matching drives in a hardware or software RAID. Just needs to be at least as big as the previous.

I have had issues with non-vendor drives in Dell and/or HP systems.

(I am a pro, but not your pro.)

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