The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/thestreetsamurai on 2025-01-18 00:48:36.
TLDR; ServerPartDeals is a fantastic company and ordering and RMAing in Canada is a breeze.
Its likely no surprise to most of you that ServerPartDeals is great. There have been a -ton- of positive reviews here.
However, I'm in Canada and I was worried about both how easy / costly it was going to be to get drives in Canada and also how difficult / costly it was going to be if I needed to RMA a drive.
I was building a new TrueNAS build and the drive cost (even buying used) was easily double the cost of the rest of the build combined.
I ordered 13x recertified 18tb Seagate EXOS X20s from ServerPartDeals on July 28, 2024 (a Sunday). Shipping was $107.11 CDN. The order arrived August 1, 2024... so 4 business days later. No additional customs charges. Immaculately packaged. (Ironically the drives arrived way before any of the other parts of my build so I had to wait around a few weeks for everything else to arrive)
I ran BadBlocks on all 13 drives before doing anything and all of them passed with no problems found. Sweet!
Over Christmas however, TrueNAS started complaining about one of the drives. Smartly I had bought a spare drive (12 in the build + 1 spare). Stupidly I hadn't attached it to my NAS (to save power) and I was away for 3 weeks from home. Three slightly stressful weeks later the drive was still throwing errors but my RaidZ2 vdev was still going strong (glad I opted for the Z2 or I would have been waaay more stressed about it). Anyway popped in the spare, turned off the bad drive, re-silvered and I was good-to-go (TrueNAS is fantastic!).
For the RMA, I contacted ServerPartDeals and they got back to me within 12 hours. Really nice agent asked for some information about the order and the SMART results for the drive. Once I'd sent them, within 12 hours I had an address and an RMA # in Florida. $28 shipping cost through Canada Post (with tracking number). The drive was delivered to SPD on January 15, 2025. The same agent contacted me yesterday to say that my replacement drive was sent our via UPS with tracking number. It'll be here by Monday Jan 20, 2025.
Not affiliated with SPD in any way even though this may sound like a shill. Honestly I can't think of a single way that my interaction with them on both the purchase or the RMA could have gone better. I also can't think of a reason why I'd buy from anywhere else going forward.
Thanks to everyone here for the great recommendation, hope this helps some of your in Canada, and happy hoarding!