Hmm, het the drives, check the smart data and run the full surface test. If the drives pass the tets, you should be fine. Also, clarify about warranty on refurb drives since they usually have a limited warranty for 2 years.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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The key to keeping your data longterm is not RAID. raidisnotabackup.com Unless you run a critical server 2 drive parity with 3 total drives is total overkill.
If you are fine with a bit of downtime during recovery I would not bother with RAID at all if you only need a single drive to satisfy your storage needs. Only when you have multiple drives being able to resilver rather than restore is worth the premium. You might want to get a new drive as they do not cost that much extra and will likely live a fair bit longer so they do not cost anything extra in the long run. You might use some of those refurb drives for your backup server though.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that I have 4x 4TB drives that will be brought in (prior array), so this would eventually be 5-6 drives once the drives are in, with room to add more from there. Thank you for the advice, I'll see if I can get close with 1p new and a backup drives.
Out of interest, where are there new drives that cost not much more. When I look at retail in the UK, a 10TB drive is 3 times the cost of these 4-5 year used refurbs. If I could find something 0 -100% more I would likely go new.
You need at least like 5-6 drives for double parity to be economical. Aside from that you need backup.
Thank you - I have 4 other 4TB drives that would make up the pool and several 2TB drives. I would estimate this to be a pool size starting at 5+ drives and rising, so I wanted to get the parity in place now. But this makes sense, I am considering how to approach a 1 parity situaiton.
Note that any sane RAID software will limit the size used on each drive to the size of the smallest drive in the array.
I would stay away from reconditioned
What is your experience?