Is Buying a PETABYTE on Ebay Stupid?

With our quest to store all of the footage we’ve ever shot for our videos, we’re constantly in need of more storage. Unfortunately, storage is expensive, but when we found drives on eBay for nearly 50% off - we did what any sane folks would, and spent $10,000+ on them. Will we regret it?

Seagate’s full reply to our question about where recertified drives come from: “The drives come from a variety of sources and may become available to the refurbishment process for a range of reasons from commercial to technical. Drives are repaired and/or upgraded as appropriate, then re-tested to ensure they meet or exceed quality and performance requirements as per the relevant data sheet and will perform well for the term of the warranty.”

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

CHAPTERS
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0:00 I bought a Petabyte on eBay for 50% off
1:38 What's the catch?
2:32 Unboxing the Petabyte
3:23 Where did we buy them?
4:27 Testing the power on hours
4:40 The server we're installing them in
5:30 Smaller setups for homelab or small business
6:40 Building the server
9:40 Does it boot?
10:18 The software
11:11 Do all the drives work?
11:53 Making a ZFS pool
13:46 Speed testing
14:26 Where do these drives come from?
15:00 Conclusion

[Movingfrag]

Ok, from the perspective of a guy who works a lot with huge data centers: data centers buy hard drives in bulk, often much more than they can use so they have on site cold spares. Depending on the protocol it can be up to 40% of the drives purchased. And when they migrate to a bigger hard drives or to SSD storage they often have a plan where unused spares are returned for some percentage of the initial cost. Unlike used drives that are handled by the e-waste recyclers and often just destroyed (again based on the policy of the data center) spares are often returned to the original manufacturers. So here's a base for re-certified drives.

[sakaraist]

The last Seagate product I bought was an external drive, When it died they had me take it out of it's enclosure and directly connect to the drive because SeaTools could only identify it via SATA and not USB. They they denied my warranty claim because it was an external drive that was removed from its enclosure. 10/10 company, would watch their headquarters burn down and not call the fire department.

22 days power on time btw.

[potatopotatopotatopotatopo]

Man I've missed server videos on LTT. They are easily the most knowledge packed videos and it's just all so strictly about pcs and nothing else. I love it

[xDestin]

I love that little trick Jake showed about seeing if your computer is on by checking if the caps lock button lights up or not. This is something I've been doing for years especially when I was trying to see if my old computer was frozen or just stuttering lol.

[ryanbeaver]

I may be wrong, but the stamp you all are pointing at for the manufactured date (called a "clock") is an insert used on the injection mold tool to identify when that part was manufactured, not necessarily the entire drive being assembled, recertified, and ready to be re-sold. (this way if a problem is identified, they can tell which tool/cavity within the tool is having the issue and monitor tool wear over time).

[watercannonscollaboration]

5:07 as someone who works at AWS, if you thought NZXT was a massive scam, wait until you discover AWS: the cloud has its uses, a lot of uses, but it’s not a silver bullet

[Davski]

I guess the FeRAM petabyte build was too expensive huh?

[Deeppurp]

Petabyte to 2016 LTT: #Company goals
Petabyte to 2024 LTT: Am I some kind of joke?

[stephenhenry]

16:31 - loved seeing the company I work for in one of your videos, even if it was just the advertisement. We take great pride in the testing and listing refurbished IT and it was really cool to see it appear briefly in the video! Thank you guys!

[dooffff]

Thank you for making the sponsor spots exactly 10 seconds, you people are angels

[Glitch-Vids]

Bought 5 14TB drives that were pulled from a server off EBay. They were about $150 CAD each. So far with 24/7 power on they’re doing great

[StephenBaylor]

I'm currently using 8-20TB recertified drives, and 12-16TB recertified drives. I've been using them for years with no issue. Years ago, I purchased 8-4TB drives brand new from Newegg. 6 of them were DOA, and another failed shortly after. Honestly, I've had much better luck with recertified drives than I have with new drives.

[danwhite]

I've bought a couple of WD Gold drives from eBay and they're awesome. Super cheap, large capacity, and much more reliable than regular consumer drives.

[LuchoTiz]

I work in the satellite data industry for many years and is quite common for the server/disk producers to refurbish the failed disk, in many cases disk fail by software/driver and they can fix them. So usually the procedure is to take out the failed ones, send them back to be fixed and they send "new" ones or refurbished to replace them.

[mattb]

I’m running 12 of SPD’s 20TB drives in my unraid server. Ordered in two batches of 6. First batch is over a year old, second batch closer to 3 months old. Zero issues. Absolutely love SPD. So much better than shucking 10TB drives. Really helped me transfer back to 100% local storage after the unlimited google drive party ended.

[GRCDriver]

I did something similar though not at that scale. Paid $600 shipped for 5x 12TB WD Ultrastar drives from server parts deals. I set up freenas on a newer 5600G AM4 based system with 32GB of RAM and use it as a media NAS. Similar LSI HBA in IT mode from eBay for like $20 as they show in the video. Built it in the Lian Li A3 using a $15 5-bay drive cage 3.5in drive cage.

Storage pool is a RAID Z2 for extra redundancy. I did have one drive fail a smart test within a couple weeks and SPD were helpful and quick about replacing it, even as a hurricane came through near their HQ in FL. Everything has been rock solid for almost 4 months now. This is the only way to get this kind of storage density.. I can pull 280MB/s over a 2.5GB switch. Love it!

[TannerBugatti]

I've run Server Part Deal drives in my NAS for years with tons of TBW with no issues.

[bandguymichael]

Picked up a refurbished 12TB Segate drive off eBay earlier this year for about $90 USD. Seller was also Server Parts Deals! Two year warranty, and so far with about 6, 000 hours of use in my media server, the drive has been flawless!

[AppaFappa]

I even went the route of buying 10x 4TB used enterprise-grade HGST drives. I checked them with harddisk sentinel and they had over 400TB read and 200TB written. SMART data still looked good and hard disk sentinel graded them as 100% health. They have been going strong without issue! I won't buy new drives anymore, as buying a box of 10 is the same price as 2 new drives. I'll just buy another box when they start to fail!

[romancolthart]

I purchased 4 of the exact same recertified Exos 20TB drives a little over two years ago and they've been running perfectly fine.