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.
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.
I had the same experience with a western digital just that it was not possible to connect it via SATA because there was a custom controler Board on there soldered directly to USB so there is that...
I would have never let that drop! holy shit. I'm standing my ground and will do whatever it takes to get my new drive on warranty and compensation for being scammed out of it lol
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
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).
I don't think they were implying that, Jake even comments that that drive model was released at the very start of 2021. They definitely don't think that's the date they were recertified and resold.
@@smalltime0 It still would indicate if the drives were manufactured around the same time, they're more likely than not not gonna be manufacturing drives with parts made in 3 different years.
@@smalltime0 Yep this is what I was talking about. The clock is molded into the part, not a sticker. It's entirely for the toolbuilder/molding shop and deciding when to EOL/ do maintenance on a tool or cavity within a tool
Recertified driver, or white labels, are often drives that were returned by OEM integrators such as Dell or Lenovo. The reasons for return may wary but most common is that they would ve selling them at a loss since HDD margins are fairly thin nowadays, so it is better for them to send them back and exchange them for newer models. Usually the return happens when manufacturer warranty runs out, as even OEM just RMA storage to seagate/wd and having thousands of drive they have no warranty on is just not really worth the risk for them. Overwhelming majority of these drives are absolutely fine, albeit old. I'd even argue they are better since they go through QA twice (hence "recertified").
@ Looks like the seller I got them from doesn’t have any listed at the moment but the drives were WD WUH721414ALE6L4 14TB. EAST DIGITAL seems to have the least expensive reputable drives. I’ve been there though, paid almost the same amount for 4TB SSHD’s a couple years ago. They are still going strong but with 10TB less it’s just nuts
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
I’d say cloud’s main benefit here is the option to have backups in geographically diverse locations. Kinda solves the risk of a fire or disaster causing you to lose everything
@@Mike_WhoIt's still way more cost effective if you could set up a backup at your parents'/sibling's/friend's home. Though ideally you'd go for someone in a different city, obviously.
I met a few guys from AWS and asked them what they thought about people migrating back to more on-prem hardware, from majority cloud for whatever reason. It was a business setting so they didn’t really concede much haha (and I agree they’ll always be needed), but personally I see on-prem being a common thing in the future in terms of it being more cost-effective and security-effective, as well as less latent in remote locations for llm stuff to be run locally (plus overall more distributed power consumption).
@@ZacharySchmook I read recently they’re opening nondescript locations where there’s a big data suck pipe (technical term) for you book time to drop off your data
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.
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!
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.
Well its kinda how hard drives are - they either die early or live years or even decades zero issues. Slightly used drives (like at least few months) are already past die early phase.
You didn't say where you bought the recertified drives, but I believe the problem is how Newegg ships their drives (or at least used to). They didn't put enough padding. I stopped buying HDDs from them because I got tired of receiving DOA drives. I've had no problems with new HDDs purchased from Amazon, B&H, and locally at Best Buy and Micro Center (and Fry's when they existed).
Thinking about it, why go for anything BUT recertified drives. You skip the latest hardware shipments and fresh unsealed product, but there's a much higher chance that it works as intended for hopefully as long as brand new. I'd rather get a solid reliable drive running for 5 years for cheaper, than a possible over 5 year drive with a potential of being a bad batch.
Eight recert 16TB drives here also from serverpartdeals, and I had 8TB drives from them before this year's upgrade. The first 8TB recert drive to die took 4 years, and they all run hotter than they should tbh inside a Synology DS1819+ with a 2.5GBE mod. I consider modern Synology unaffordable current day, so I'd go the custom chassis route now if I was starting from scratch.
I think it would be sweet to get a "mother video" on NAS building, similar to the 2020ish PC Build Guides. 'Read Cacheing and Level 2 Arc' is complete gibberish to me, but I still want to build a NAS sometime soon with old parts when I build my next PC.
"How to Build a NAS, the last guide you'll ever need!" 2025 Edition! But for real, after buying HexOS recently, I still feel like I could use a couple more pointers before fully committing to it.
@joee7452 i can see that, but so can computer building - which is why that guide showed us how to build a standard ATX mid tower. Im not talking about necessarily making the complete wikia on network storage, moreso like the guide where "this is 2-3 common ways one deploys this, and x is the most common for regular powerusers, so heres an example" or "These are the most common OS features and this is what theyre used for, so this is how we use it". They can intro it by talking about how home networks work, include some general anatomy shared across most form factors, and finish by configuring a simple RAID 1, an Un-RAID array, and a brief explanation of maintenance.
Yes!! Or even the talk about "RaidZ expansion features" allowing for pool expansion. Does that work with ZFS and TrueNAS? Wouldn't that invalidate the one main advantage of UnRaid?
@@Emperor.of.Organos The basics in a nutshell for a ZFS nas is that ZFS has to trust that something has the correct data. It chooses to trust the contents of memory. If there is a disagreement between disk and memory ZFS is going to choose memory. The effect of this on building your server is that you want to build a machine with a strong memory setup. Use ECC memory if you can. If the PSU is very old replace it with something new from a quality manufacturer. 10gb ethernet intel cards are cheap on ebay. x520, x540, x550 etc IBM m1115, m1015 raid cards are also super cheap for connecting disks to. (Flash to IT mode)
@@dennispremoli7950RaidZ is part of ZFS (where the Z comes from) and available on TrueNAS. Pool expansion isn’t the same as just adding more drives to a raid array (as I’ve learned after trying to do that today) which IIRC unraid lets you do.
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.
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!
So wait, you’re running 60TB RAIDZ2 with only 32GB RAM? Have you had any issues over 30TB of data? They say 1GB per 1TB, but I see my ram usage is low in my 24TB setup with 32GB. I’ve been wondering if it’s not really true. They say some pretty bad corruption/loss can happen if you run out of ram. I’ve been tempted to add more storage but have been scared of data loss.
@@andrewskaterrr I could be completely wrong about this, because I have only recently been trying to learn about ZFS and ZRAID in preparation for building my own media storage, but as I understand it from my (Pentium II, upgraded to Pentium III, ProLiant) server days, using hardware RAID 5, wouldn't his ZRAID2 array have two drives of redundancy (What I am going for is ZRAID2 with 8 12TB refurb Seagate drives, so this is a real question for me, too!) and only 3 x 16 (1,000-based, not 1024) drives of working capacity, and therefore staying [barely] under the 1 GB : 1 TB rule? The old motherboard I intend to repurpose has a 64 GB max on RAM, so I was planning on 7 active -2 redundancy + 1 spare.
Same here. +1 for server parts deals as well as gohardrives. I've used goharddrives multiple times on multiple home NAS builds and the drives as well as support are solid. The drives have a 5 year warranty and I've tested that once and they had a replacement out to me pronto. Besides, since you're running many drives, you have raid redundancy and since you are buying so many, so cheap, you can run multiple NAS boxes and back up your data multiple times in multiple locations. I feel very secure about my data being safe with all those factors in place. Give both these companies a look. Oh, and look at the sweet spot at the time you shop. Avoid the biggest, newest and the older drives. Right now, the best bang for the buck is in the 12TB to 16TB range.
Thing is, if they had purchased the drives from SPD directly through their website instead of through eBay, Linus & Co. would have gotten twice the warranty (2 years instead of the 1 year SPD offers on the same manufacturer refurbed drives through their eBay store) and at slightly better per-unit costs (which Linus mentions in the video). SPD is a homelabbers/data horder's best friend; almost all of the twenty HDDs between my two Unraid boxes (ten each in both my active media server and my backup server) have been purchased from them over the past 3-4 years.
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!
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.
Is it Helium or normal? Are they enterprise grade? Are they a sata connector or another one that is typically used for enterprise drives i forgot the name of it
You can't just say that they are more reliable, as the manufacurers promise just isn't valid for ebay drives... I do think it's a good deal though... just not THAT good
@DrewColpurs how would they be able to make serious claims about reliability from just after drives? I you need hundreds of drives each from different models and vedors to actually get meaningful data about reliability. Personally I never had a drive that was still in use die on me but that doesn't really say much about the drives, I just got lucky.
I tend to open multiple videos in different tabs. I had a L1Techs video open and accidentally changed tabs when Linus asked what the catch was, and Wendel said "RELIABILITY". Perfect serendipity.
@@dianaisnthere why so, I personally find it less annoying to open multiple at a time, since I can just let them sit there till I actually want to watch it, if I were to not open them at the same time then youtube will most likely change the recommendation on my feed and I'll forget I even wanted to watch the video to begin with
I work for a brokerage company, you will be surprised how many companies have storage drives as backs ready for failures. They will keep the stock up even if they are completely upgrading their system. You will also get some companies that shut down or go bust and all internal stock is auctioned off. I see drives like this all the time expecting some usage and seeing 0 POT is amazing
That was my first thought. We had a few spare drives for a quick swap on site even though our SLA was 6 hours 24x7. Tech would rather you install your own drive at 11 pm and Then send a then drive via UPS. Instead of 3 hours, install drive then drive home arriving at 5:15 AM. We were not a data company.
Honoestly I bought a drive from server part deals a few months ago aswell because I saw the offer and simply couldn't pass it up! Honestly super reassuring to see this video and to hear that they are now one of your sponsors!
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.
This year I purchased 36 of the recertified 10TB He10s you find on Amazon for $75 to $85 each. As far as I can see the recertified meant used for these. Before putting these into production I ran a 4 pass badblocks test on every single one of them which took nearly a week to complete. Edit: Not sure what happened to my previous reply anyways the drives from Amazon did have a few thousand hours of runtime on them and they are not sold by Amazon.
@@deauthorsadeptus6920 All of the He10s had a few thousand hours of usage on them. They were very clean and didn't appear to be opened as far as I can tell. Someone ran a SMART short test on them before they shipped as this was in the SMART log. I started with a small batch and after they tested flawless I ordered a few more and finally a month or so ago I added an additional 20 pack to fill every slot in a new supermicro 36 bay server.
I've heard pretty good things about these drives. I have 24 he8 drives I got from ebay that have been completely problem free for about 3 years now. they have really impressive power consumption compared to the old seagate drives I used to run. nearly half for my whole array while idling.
I've been burned by Seagate and I'm mixed on WD, Hitachi drives have been absolute troopers for me. So I bought 2 new-old stock He10s off Amazon. They lasted 6 months before both had over 50 critical errors. Both had 0 hours when I started, behaved great until then, were in a proper anti-vibration mounting. $400 hurts so much to me and I gave up trying to get a refund, now that that part of the company is owned by WD and I'm in Canada I don't seem to be able to get a refund from WD. They are an enterprise product and WD only seems to have end user support for formerly-Hitachi enterprise products in the U.S. and Mexico and I'm in Canada I've just considered that money lost and tried to move on. I can't afford to find a different alternative and all I wanted was reliable storage instead of decade old e-waste Sas drives in a hardware array that doesn't allow me to read their SMART status
I bought some refurbished 12TB WD Ultrastar Helium drives for my home NAS that were a fraction of the cost of new ones at the time. So far they have performed great. And if one does die, it will be pretty inexpensive to replace it with another refurbished drive. Only problem with those big drives is that they take a LONG time to rebuild when you do need to replace one.
All HDD's take a long time to rebuild when you replace one in a redundant storage. Sure faster drives may rebuild faster, but it's not dramatically faster. So recertified or new doesn't really matter for that. The only way rebuilding drives get faster is if you have SSD drives, and preferably PCIe ones at that as both SATA and SAS is way slower. It's part of the game. Thinking back many may years, lest call it two or possibly three decades, a customer had a interesting project. They were developing a technique that would allow them to print circuits on plastic film using a sort of inkjet printer. Now it never got anywhere as far as I know, but at the time Nintendo was interested in this as they wanted memory storage for game cartridges that would be about as cheap as optical disks, and this was something they was considering to invest in. Now if it had succeeded it would have made SSD storage a lot cheaper and available a lot earlier than how it all turned out. Performance wouldn't have been anywhere near what we see from flash memory today, but it would still have been a lot better at random access than HDD's. Oh the things we missed out on. Well I guess that film would have ended up cracking as it aged and the circuits delaminating or something. Probably a good thing we didn't have to suffer through that. People had all kinds of strange ideas back then. Some worked while others successfully failed.
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!
Man, LTT has the best sponsor spots on YT and I will die on that hill. They do their best to be clever with the introduction and the spots are relatively short. No other channel comes close
@PJM257 curious, how better? Even the decent ones are usually 3 minutes long of talking points. The only other channel that's decent was donut/big time when they made original content for the ad
I bought one of the NetApp DiskShelves back in 2020, for $150 off eBay, when I got interested in setting up a NAS for home and bought 2 recertified 4TB drives with, a 5 year warranty, off Amazon for around $60 bucks each. I already had a couple so it was a good start and by the end of 2020 I had eight 4TB. I bought three 10TB recertified drives last year for $80 each to bump things up and I have had zero problems with the any of the drive thus far! Who knows what I will get next, but will continue looking at the recertified drives! They're a great deal!
Got lucky at a local electronics recycler when they got 6x 16TB exos drives in, all lowish hours and picked them up for 800CAD. Theyve been running smoothly with no issues for 1.5 years now
Heads up, I would NOT recommend the Jonsbo N4 that you flashed at 5:40 . The layout is pretty awful, the drives don't stay cool enough, personally I would not build in it again. It essentially requires some 3D printed parts and some extra cooling fans to work, and most SFX power supplies will need a cable extension for the 24 pin due to the awkward layout.
16:08 Right here is where I was thinking about how it’s also probably worth it to save the money on re-certified, because if you wanted to spend more for the extra 3 years of warranty, you’d possibly miss out on buying new drives at year 4 that cost less and store more as I’m sure there’d be another leap in 5 years time.
It really depends on your use case. If you were cold storing some data, you might want to spend the extra knowing that these haven't been opened up after manufacture (some of the recertified drives have had controllers replaced etc. but AFAIK it isn't the norm). If you were doing that though, you may as well get tapes and do it properly, but whatev.
@@smalltime0 For cold storage I use the cheapest drives, extra redundancy, and make sure the redundancy is across multiple batches. It seems worth it to get the super cheap drives.
I bought some SAS Seagate Exos 14TB drives for like 100-110 USD each and still working good a year later with no SMART errors in site. Got 3 for my TrueNAS and got loads of storage.
หลายเดือนก่อน +1
I bought four SATA 18 TB Exos for 550 € total (avg. salary in my country is ~1400 €). I want one off-site and three of them in RAIDZ1 (2+1). I don't know what should I put them in.
Same here, we run two servers, one a duplicate backup running over 10 of these drives in each and haven't *knocks on wood* had an issue yet over many years. Cheap and effective.
Last Seagate drive I had was a 3TB. It started to fail just within warranty, so I went to get it replaced. They sent a "certified refurb" that was in even worse condition right out of the box. I notified them and they promised a manufactured new replacement; when that arrived, it was a completely DoA refurb again. Then they promised a mfr new AGAIN... AND THAT TOTALLY FAILED IN 2 MONTHS. So they replaced THAT drive with a drive that TOTALLY FAILED IN 6 MONTHS. I didn't bother contacting them again and I've convinced several people not to deal with them since. None of my WD HDDs have failed, nor have the ones I've recommended people. Even the used, 20yr+ old IDE HDDs we use for old electronics are either Toshiba or WD. I think it's usually Seagates that we're replacing. I don't recommend WD SSDs, because they hid how they shut off 2 lanes on a PCIe4x4 SSD in a gen 3 slot. That caused an issue in a mobo that didn't allow 3x2, only 3x4. 1 RMA: 5 bad drives.
Bought a 12TB recertified drive from a company in Singapore about a month ago, put it in a cheap 3.5" enclosure from amazon and connected it to my mini PC. Working brilliantly with my Plex server and its half full now so considering doing the exact same thing with a second one!
Really glad you made this video, I was tired of getting good deals on manufacturer recertified drives. I'm glad I can now pay $100 more per drive after this video.
Short answer NOP. There are almost no commercially available CPU's or GPU's for that matter that have hardware build agents in them. So it's misleading advertising in it's purest form. // To clarify RTX is not AI, nor software that is optimized to run AI related tasks
To be fair, even AI isn't AI. So it's not any worse than LLM and diffusion models branded as AI. Meaningless term all around. AI still doesn't exist. Part of me kind of thinks it's poetic justice that everyone co-opted the term and made it lose any meaning it had because it didn't have any real meaning to begin with.
I've been buying refurbished HDDs from Server Part Deals for years now. I did receive a bad drive from them once (I always do a block sector check on all new drives as they'll be in some NAS or work environment for years). I emailed their RMA department, showed them the screenshot of the drive results and the bad block. In a day they got back to me, RMA'd the drive and I got a replacement drive a few days later. So you might get a bad drive but their support is absolutely fantastic when issues come up. Given that the drives can be less than half the price of a new drive and comes with a few years of warranty, it's a no brainier. Just so a sector scan before installing the drive and a long SMART test.
I've looked specifically at manufacturer recertified drives, but I've held back for two reasons: Money (homelabbing is expensive), which held back the next step and the next reason, figuring out exactly what the manufacturer recertification means. Thanks for clearning that up :)
Recertified drives used to be hard drives that had fully functional drive mechanisms, but faulty controllers and/or interfaces that were replaced by the manufacturer and re-tested.
3:15 ooOOoo...different batches of drives. This is very good for a RAID setup as all the drives are not from the same batch. Meaning if one drive fails, the others will not fail soon after wards.
I've got about 300TB's worth of recert drives in my homelabs, many have been spinning for 3-4 years with only one drive failure at just under a year. For smaller use cases, keep a drive or two on hand as a cold spare and you'll still save some serious cash.
"Storage ain't cheap" - I mean, for the average user in 2024, it kind of is, relative to what it was 20 years ago. Yeah, if you're a media company, your needs are going to cost way more.
Yeah, it really is their media side. I imagine if they were trying to be efficient they could just compress their bazillion gigs of raw video files to something far more reasonable, or, they could even shoot normal people camera settings with normal people gear and save 1/50th of the storage space but it would look reflect poorly on their company if the videos they produced looked like they came from 2010 😂 But at least they'd have enough storage to do most of the things they mentioned not doing yet
@@maverick9708 agreed... that's the price of them doing a quality job. However.... I do feel that most of that "data producing" tech can be far more efficient.
I am basically paying the same for storage nowadays as I paid 20 years ago on my first rig. With the distinction that nowadays I never run out of storage or have to uninstall a big game before installing another Edit: omg, it's 20 years already, not 10-15 as I thought...
Thanks for blowing up my spot, I was about to place an order from these guys... Hopefully they still have stock lol. I love how every 6 month we all do the true nas video 😂
I've gotten a few recertified enterprise drives without issues. Got a set of 4, all different batches, with 3 year warranties, and only 1 has failed in that time, covered by the seller. Pretty good to get the capacity and longer warranties than a true USED drive, and statistically being from different batches does reduce same-time failures
I only buy used 18TB on ebay for my server. Running 32 bays + 2 hot spares. They fail just as randomly and just as often as "new" drives. Some are running for 5+ years now, some only a few thousand hours. It seems to matter very little and i save alot at 10€/TB used vs 20€/TB new.
I´ve bought numerous recertified drives via Amazon, and they´ve been all sock solid since. Very much worth it as long as you ensure parity with backups (which you should do anyways). eBay, provided it´s a good local seller is also a solid option, though I prefer the former where possible.
Also just bought 3 12TB Seagate Ironwolfs that are re-certified by Seagate. And so far no issues. And I only paid as much for those 3 as I would have for ONE new
I've had 8 of the same Seagate Exos 20TB recertified drives running on my Qnap nas for some years now. The Qnap garbage broke down, but all the drives are happily continuing their lives in my new Unraid setup. The smart details are still showing zero reallocated sectors, which is great. I'm very happy with these recertificated drives.
5:45 Anybody that's going the repurposed business PC route and wondering what specs they should look for before buying something: -Light file server: Pretty much anything including SBCs would work but if you're bringing in a new device I'd get something with at least 7th gen intel and room for expandability. -Media server: i3-8300 or higher, intel's igpus and their media transcoding hardware (quicksync) got significantly better that gen. You won't need a gpu for most cases unless you have a lot of simultaneous users. I recommend HP Prodesk G6 or higher and Lenovo Thinkcentres for compact and low power options. Tons on ebay. -Huge media server: Consider an Arc GPU to transcode everything to AV1. -Production/video editing server: Stepping up your budget for something with high speed ethernet and ECC memory support built into the mobo can be worth it for the energy savings and peace of mind. Look around at home server youtubers like Wolfgang's Channel or Jim's Garage for hardware tips.
I've had nothing but problems with Seagate drives for years. Their recertified drives have been the absolute worst. If they work for you folks that's awesome but after losing TBs worth of data repeatedly I vowed to never buy from them again
He could have spent just over twice the price for brand new ssds, this video is as far as i can tell, just to draw people in that see a lot of drives and says wow. They bought them a year ago, clearly not NEEDED otherwise it would have been done already.
I have had very good results with Exos drives. They are “enterprise” grade but don’t really cost more than similar capacity “NAS” drives and I have found they are more reliable. YMMV of course
They have the worst failure rate at Backblaze. That said the failure rate is still only a few percent per year (instead of less than a percent like other brands), so you do the math and they could still be the best option.
I started my current rendition of my NAS back in 2012 or so with 9x of their 3TB drives. Pretty sure same seller on ebay (or was VERY similar listings, server recertified stuff). Those 9 drives are STILL in use to this day in various rigs around my PC collection. Currently have been rocking 6x 14TB drives, also recertified ebay drives. They've been rocking for 4 years straight, not one hiccup. Every hard drive in my current collection has been recertified drives, haven't had one problem yet. Did have ONE drive fail a zero fill on arrival but the seller sent a replacement immediately.
Need more Jake videos. Somehow he is so good at talking way over my head while still explaining in elementary terms that we mere mortals can understand
It's the apocalypse, the internet is gone but trickles of electricity remain. A petabyte drive has been foretold to hold endless amounts of movies and tv shows. It hangs around the neck of the ultimate wasteland warrior, Lionus. (Linus)
I've had great experiences with refurbished PC's that came with amazing drives. Never got drives seperately. One lesson learned and I'll share here is that a listing for "1 TB of storage" could mean two drives of 500gb each. So be wary of that, that's twice the power consumption and double the heat after all. Other than that, check what your locals are promising, check if they deliver. And simply make sure to return it and claim your rights if something is off. Great experiences overall, saved a ton.
for home projects I have been recommending the WD Easystore external from Best Buy. If you watch the sales you can get up to 20TB for $300 or less. Shuck the drive, you sometimes have to put tape over one of the power connector pin and it works great. WD still warranties them even if they have been removed from the external housing.
I originally bought 2 14TB seagate refurbished drives for my NAS at home through Amazon. Within a few months, one of them died, got my money back and ordered a new one. I didn't register the serial numbers, but quickly another one failed, again got my money back, but now ordered a new 16TB disk from a local company. The price was also almost a halve more, but I lost trust in refurbished disks. I don't have time to be continously replacing disks, and not all my data is backupped, the risk is also too high for me.
I've been using SPD for years-just picked up a set of refurb 22TB Exos drives-and have never had a problem. They package them really well and the last few times I've been able to get free second-day air.
I've been running refurb HGST 8TB drives for ~3 years now in my desktop (2 drives) and have had a great experience, so much so that I used the 12TB variant of the same drives, 8 of them, in a RAIDZ2 setup that I did in much the same way as in the video, just in my old desktop and its Fractal Design Define R5. That's been running for ~3 months and has been rock solid as well. 72TB array has been a great upgrade and I wouldn't do anything different if I had to do it again.
I've had great success with Seagate drives in RAID. Even the base Barracuda drives, I got a refurb as a warranty replacement and it was rock solid for quite a few years (although it always ran 2c hotter than its neighbours). It did end up dying though.
I got a recertified Seagate 14TB drive from Server Part Deals a few years ago and its still going great. It's also like double the speed of my regular old 2TB hard drives, which I wasn't expecting.
I just got 6 recertified 18TB drives from server part deals for my new nas during black friday for $160 each. Then Honey found an LTT coupon for $50 off. I wish the 20TB drives would have still been $180 instead of $222.
Wait, where does it say they do a 50 hour burn-in? From what I've got. Seagate never specified the amount of burn-in performed. They only specified the drive won't have more than 50 power on hours. Linus seems to imply the burn-in involves writing all zeros to the drives.
I've been using 8 used eBay NAS drives for over 4 years with unRaid. Only one started throwing errors, and the SMART data even reported the drive might fail way back when I first installed it, I also through some old dissasembled external drives in my NAS for Plex, and those have lasted about 3 years before starting through errors too. They weren't NAS drives and were almost 10 years old, so I was happy with the last of their lives. With 2 parity drives I've been able to swap them out no problem.
One gigabyte of RAM per terabyte of data is a myth that needs to die. How much CPU and RAM you need is completely dependent on your workload and network bandwidth.
Yeah...and with that amount of storage it doesn't matter, network is always the bottleneck (not to mention throwing away perfectly fine xeon board cause you couldn't spend like 100 bucks for xeon cpu that isn't low tier, low core count).
I got one of those recertified Seagate Exos drives almost a year ago. So far, all I can tell is that it is substantially louder than every other drive I have in my server. I assumed that maybe those are just loud in general, and people return them because of this, thinking that they might be a ticking time bomb.
Recertification is done by Seagate themselves? Oh well that should be fine then! Considering that their NEW drives are so well known for only blowing up a year after first deployment. Edit: If you want more testimony, every hard drive failure I've ever seen myself, for family, for friends, whether it be Desktop, Laptop, Game Console or portable storage device, every single one of them was a Seagate, and they were each no more than 2 years old. Meanwhile my WD Golds are about to be a decade old, outliving the components they were originally built with, and still refuse to quit.
Bad news: it's just chance. Actuarial comparisons put WD and Seagate pretty close to each other in terms of real failure rates ("frequency"). That's true across industry segments but individual product lines may deviate. Source: have worked in data analytics for warranty/insurance/reinsurance companies.
Each manufacturer has failures. I have had Seagates, WDs, and Toshibas last years and years before they start to fail. I've also had some last only a few months. My most recent was a Seagate that started to take a long time to access, but it was over 12 years old and had a ton of restarts and power on hours.
I got a pair of 2TB Constellation ES drives from a similar sort of dealer a little over 5 years back for my system upgrade. (software RAID1 for in-system backups, I can't afford and don't need an external storage system) They have worked flawlessly for 5 years, despite several people on the LTT forums warning me that they would be likely to fail within days. (they also kept trying to push me to get a far more complex backup system than I actually needed) No failures or errors of any kind, and both drives were from the same batch with 0 power-on hours when I received them.
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.
Is it also possible that data centres buy so many that they get quite a few duds which get sent back and fixed and recertified?
Obviously. Amazing you think that is new information.
@@ASDasdSDsadASD-nc7lfdid u even watch the video? Half of it was them wondering where they come from.
@@ASDasdSDsadASD-nc7lf yeah, that's totally common knowledge that everyone should know 🙄
Thanks for info buddy
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.
I've had terrible luck with Seagate drives for years. I'd roast marshmallows on the fire while laughing
I had the same experience with a western digital just that it was not possible to connect it via SATA because there was a custom controler Board on there soldered directly to USB so there is that...
Ohh man that's so horrible it becomes comical. I have one 8TB USB disc. Will not follow their instructions if the same happens to me.
I would have never let that drop! holy shit. I'm standing my ground and will do whatever it takes to get my new drive on warranty and compensation for being scammed out of it lol
Yeah you can save a couple bucks on Seagate drives but I hate dealing with their support. Toshiba is the better budget pick imo
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
The last one was like 6 months ago... Yes I enjoy these videos, but I wouldn't want to see server video every week. Just saying.
The last one was like 6 months ago... Yes I enjoy these videos, but I wouldn't want to see server video every week. Just saying.
This is total jank. Can't even begin to explain what's being done wrong here but the hardware itself is nice.
They’re so very specifically NOT about Personal Computers. Almost every other video on the channel is PC related OTHER THAN the server videos.
The last one was like 6 months ago... Yes I enjoy these videos, but I wouldn't want to see server video every week. Just saying.
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).
Given that's how it works with anything else, I assume it's the case with HDDs
Especially because, more or less, the HDD case is pretty commodity.
I don't think they were implying that, Jake even comments that that drive model was released at the very start of 2021. They definitely don't think that's the date they were recertified and resold.
@@sciencesold_ it's later when they look at the 'clock'. Not the sticker that Jake is commenting on toward the start of the video the start
@@smalltime0 It still would indicate if the drives were manufactured around the same time, they're more likely than not not gonna be manufacturing drives with parts made in 3 different years.
@@smalltime0 Yep this is what I was talking about. The clock is molded into the part, not a sticker. It's entirely for the toolbuilder/molding shop and deciding when to EOL/ do maintenance on a tool or cavity within a tool
Recertified driver, or white labels, are often drives that were returned by OEM integrators such as Dell or Lenovo. The reasons for return may wary but most common is that they would ve selling them at a loss since HDD margins are fairly thin nowadays, so it is better for them to send them back and exchange them for newer models. Usually the return happens when manufacturer warranty runs out, as even OEM just RMA storage to seagate/wd and having thousands of drive they have no warranty on is just not really worth the risk for them.
Overwhelming majority of these drives are absolutely fine, albeit old. I'd even argue they are better since they go through QA twice (hence "recertified").
I guess the FeRAM petabyte build was too expensive huh?
Dude that’s the first thing I thought when I saw this 😂
Give it a year and he’ll probably do it lol
@@youareperf5199 I don't think he has $8.3 trillion on him.
Could you imagine how Evon would react if he did build this with FeRAM?
@@merkorbert3943 it would be like that one time LTT made the gold Xbox controller
Bought 5 14TB drives that were pulled from a server off EBay. They were about $150 CAD each. So far with 24/7 power on they’re doing great
how long have they been going?
And I'm over here paying 240$ for 4TB WD Red+... Why am I doing this to myself lmao
You mind sharing what seller you got them from?
@ Looks like the seller I got them from doesn’t have any listed at the moment but the drives were WD WUH721414ALE6L4 14TB. EAST DIGITAL seems to have the least expensive reputable drives. I’ve been there though, paid almost the same amount for 4TB SSHD’s a couple years ago. They are still going strong but with 10TB less it’s just nuts
@@fantaz_official i got 3 12tb dives 80$ a piece on ebay recertified that works great after 3 years
that's some great luck there
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
I’d say cloud’s main benefit here is the option to have backups in geographically diverse locations. Kinda solves the risk of a fire or disaster causing you to lose everything
@@Mike_WhoIt's still way more cost effective if you could set up a backup at your parents'/sibling's/friend's home. Though ideally you'd go for someone in a different city, obviously.
But if you spend enough they'll bring an entire trailer of HD racks to back up your data center.
I met a few guys from AWS and asked them what they thought about people migrating back to more on-prem hardware, from majority cloud for whatever reason.
It was a business setting so they didn’t really concede much haha (and I agree they’ll always be needed), but personally I see on-prem being a common thing in the future in terms of it being more cost-effective and security-effective, as well as less latent in remote locations for llm stuff to be run locally (plus overall more distributed power consumption).
@@ZacharySchmook I read recently they’re opening nondescript locations where there’s a big data suck pipe (technical term) for you book time to drop off your data
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.
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!
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.
Well its kinda how hard drives are - they either die early or live years or even decades zero issues. Slightly used drives (like at least few months) are already past die early phase.
You didn't say where you bought the recertified drives, but I believe the problem is how Newegg ships their drives (or at least used to). They didn't put enough padding. I stopped buying HDDs from them because I got tired of receiving DOA drives. I've had no problems with new HDDs purchased from Amazon, B&H, and locally at Best Buy and Micro Center (and Fry's when they existed).
Thinking about it, why go for anything BUT recertified drives. You skip the latest hardware shipments and fresh unsealed product, but there's a much higher chance that it works as intended for hopefully as long as brand new. I'd rather get a solid reliable drive running for 5 years for cheaper, than a possible over 5 year drive with a potential of being a bad batch.
Eight recert 16TB drives here also from serverpartdeals, and I had 8TB drives from them before this year's upgrade. The first 8TB recert drive to die took 4 years, and they all run hotter than they should tbh inside a Synology DS1819+ with a 2.5GBE mod. I consider modern Synology unaffordable current day, so I'd go the custom chassis route now if I was starting from scratch.
@@deauthorsadeptus6920 Not true at all.
Petabyte to 2016 LTT: #Company goals
Petabyte to 2024 LTT: Am I some kind of joke?
#PetaJokes
yeah, they should do an exabyte drive now as a company goal
They need to start archiving old video instead storing full project
@@tailsorange2872 the horse is here
Petabyte to 2048 "Linus' 101 acre electronics surplus yard."(formerly LTT): $25, pallet 47, row 306.
I think it would be sweet to get a "mother video" on NAS building, similar to the 2020ish PC Build Guides. 'Read Cacheing and Level 2 Arc' is complete gibberish to me, but I still want to build a NAS sometime soon with old parts when I build my next PC.
"How to Build a NAS, the last guide you'll ever need!" 2025 Edition! But for real, after buying HexOS recently, I still feel like I could use a couple more pointers before fully committing to it.
@joee7452 i can see that, but so can computer building - which is why that guide showed us how to build a standard ATX mid tower. Im not talking about necessarily making the complete wikia on network storage, moreso like the guide where "this is 2-3 common ways one deploys this, and x is the most common for regular powerusers, so heres an example" or "These are the most common OS features and this is what theyre used for, so this is how we use it". They can intro it by talking about how home networks work, include some general anatomy shared across most form factors, and finish by configuring a simple RAID 1, an Un-RAID array, and a brief explanation of maintenance.
Yes!! Or even the talk about "RaidZ expansion features" allowing for pool expansion. Does that work with ZFS and TrueNAS? Wouldn't that invalidate the one main advantage of UnRaid?
@@Emperor.of.Organos The basics in a nutshell for a ZFS nas is that ZFS has to trust that something has the correct data. It chooses to trust the contents of memory. If there is a disagreement between disk and memory ZFS is going to choose memory.
The effect of this on building your server is that you want to build a machine with a strong memory setup. Use ECC memory if you can. If the PSU is very old replace it with something new from a quality manufacturer.
10gb ethernet intel cards are cheap on ebay. x520, x540, x550 etc
IBM m1115, m1015 raid cards are also super cheap for connecting disks to. (Flash to IT mode)
@@dennispremoli7950RaidZ is part of ZFS (where the Z comes from) and available on TrueNAS. Pool expansion isn’t the same as just adding more drives to a raid array (as I’ve learned after trying to do that today) which IIRC unraid lets you do.
Love Jakes "full disclosure" actually pushes me over the edge. Thanks guys!
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.
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!
Milton don't play no shit.
an A3?? Can you tell me where to find the drive cage and how you fit that in?
So wait, you’re running 60TB RAIDZ2 with only 32GB RAM? Have you had any issues over 30TB of data? They say 1GB per 1TB, but I see my ram usage is low in my 24TB setup with 32GB. I’ve been wondering if it’s not really true. They say some pretty bad corruption/loss can happen if you run out of ram. I’ve been tempted to add more storage but have been scared of data loss.
@@andrewskaterrr I could be completely wrong about this, because I have only recently been trying to learn about ZFS and ZRAID in preparation for building my own media storage, but as I understand it from my (Pentium II, upgraded to Pentium III, ProLiant) server days, using hardware RAID 5, wouldn't his ZRAID2 array have two drives of redundancy (What I am going for is ZRAID2 with 8 12TB refurb Seagate drives, so this is a real question for me, too!) and only 3 x 16 (1,000-based, not 1024) drives of working capacity, and therefore staying [barely] under the 1 GB : 1 TB rule?
The old motherboard I intend to repurpose has a 64 GB max on RAM, so I was planning on 7 active -2 redundancy + 1 spare.
I've run Server Part Deal drives in my NAS for years with tons of TBW with no issues.
Same, ServerPartDeals rocks
The absolute best. I'm up to 5 14 TB Manufacturer recertified drives from them so far. Gonna need another DAS enclosure next time I upgrade
Same here. +1 for server parts deals as well as gohardrives.
I've used goharddrives multiple times on multiple home NAS builds and the drives as well as support are solid. The drives have a 5 year warranty and I've tested that once and they had a replacement out to me pronto.
Besides, since you're running many drives, you have raid redundancy and since you are buying so many, so cheap, you can run multiple NAS boxes and back up your data multiple times in multiple locations. I feel very secure about my data being safe with all those factors in place.
Give both these companies a look. Oh, and look at the sweet spot at the time you shop. Avoid the biggest, newest and the older drives. Right now, the best bang for the buck is in the 12TB to 16TB range.
@@Undercoverfireheyyyy I get the same ones
Thing is, if they had purchased the drives from SPD directly through their website instead of through eBay, Linus & Co. would have gotten twice the warranty (2 years instead of the 1 year SPD offers on the same manufacturer refurbed drives through their eBay store) and at slightly better per-unit costs (which Linus mentions in the video).
SPD is a homelabbers/data horder's best friend; almost all of the twenty HDDs between my two Unraid boxes (ten each in both my active media server and my backup server) have been purchased from them over the past 3-4 years.
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!
Thank you for making the sponsor spots exactly 10 seconds, you people are angels
I purchased 4 of the exact same recertified Exos 20TB drives a little over two years ago and they've been running perfectly fine.
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.
Is it Helium or normal?
Are they enterprise grade?
Are they a sata connector or
another one that is typically used for enterprise drives i forgot the name of it
@srinivaschilakala216 theyre helium filled enterprise grade SATA drives (not u.2). You can get all this info with a 30 second google search next time
You can't just say that they are more reliable, as the manufacurers promise just isn't valid for ebay drives...
I do think it's a good deal though... just not THAT good
@@JerraPremium "more reliable" probably means that they last longer due to better construction or something, not better warranty.
@DrewColpurs how would they be able to make serious claims about reliability from just after drives?
I you need hundreds of drives each from different models and vedors to actually get meaningful data about reliability.
Personally I never had a drive that was still in use die on me but that doesn't really say much about the drives, I just got lucky.
I tend to open multiple videos in different tabs. I had a L1Techs video open and accidentally changed tabs when Linus asked what the catch was, and Wendel said "RELIABILITY". Perfect serendipity.
gen alpha mf
@@dianaisnthere why so, I personally find it less annoying to open multiple at a time, since I can just let them sit there till I actually want to watch it, if I were to not open them at the same time then youtube will most likely change the recommendation on my feed and I'll forget I even wanted to watch the video to begin with
@@javierflores09 hear me out, “add to watch later”
@@javierflores09I do this too, I’m just hoping OP wasn’t intentionally watching 2 videos at the same time, that would truly be some gen alpha sh1t
@javierflores09 there's something called watch later for a reason
I work for a brokerage company, you will be surprised how many companies have storage drives as backs ready for failures. They will keep the stock up even if they are completely upgrading their system. You will also get some companies that shut down or go bust and all internal stock is auctioned off. I see drives like this all the time expecting some usage and seeing 0 POT is amazing
That was my first thought. We had a few spare drives for a quick swap on site even though our SLA was 6 hours 24x7. Tech would rather you install your own drive at 11 pm and Then send a then drive via UPS. Instead of 3 hours, install drive then drive home arriving at 5:15 AM. We were not a data company.
Honoestly I bought a drive from server part deals a few months ago aswell because I saw the offer and simply couldn't pass it up! Honestly super reassuring to see this video and to hear that they are now one of your sponsors!
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.
Jake, you've done great losing weight. I don't usually comment on such things, but I know a bunch of people gave you grief previously. F the haters.
He might be in his winter arc
Who's jake?
@@Kylethejobber The other guy in the video with Linus
Now Jake get laid 😊
Maybe diabetes? It hits on weight hard.
This year I purchased 36 of the recertified 10TB He10s you find on Amazon for $75 to $85 each. As far as I can see the recertified meant used for these. Before putting these into production I ran a 4 pass badblocks test on every single one of them which took nearly a week to complete. Edit: Not sure what happened to my previous reply anyways the drives from Amazon did have a few thousand hours of runtime on them and they are not sold by Amazon.
More like returned and repaired. It might never even been used.
@@deauthorsadeptus6920 All of the He10s had a few thousand hours of usage on them. They were very clean and didn't appear to be opened as far as I can tell. Someone ran a SMART short test on them before they shipped as this was in the SMART log. I started with a small batch and after they tested flawless I ordered a few more and finally a month or so ago I added an additional 20 pack to fill every slot in a new supermicro 36 bay server.
I've heard pretty good things about these drives. I have 24 he8 drives I got from ebay that have been completely problem free for about 3 years now. they have really impressive power consumption compared to the old seagate drives I used to run. nearly half for my whole array while idling.
I've been burned by Seagate and I'm mixed on WD, Hitachi drives have been absolute troopers for me. So I bought 2 new-old stock He10s off Amazon. They lasted 6 months before both had over 50 critical errors. Both had 0 hours when I started, behaved great until then, were in a proper anti-vibration mounting. $400 hurts so much to me and I gave up trying to get a refund, now that that part of the company is owned by WD and I'm in Canada I don't seem to be able to get a refund from WD. They are an enterprise product and WD only seems to have end user support for formerly-Hitachi enterprise products in the U.S. and Mexico and I'm in Canada I've just considered that money lost and tried to move on. I can't afford to find a different alternative and all I wanted was reliable storage instead of decade old e-waste Sas drives in a hardware array that doesn't allow me to read their SMART status
I bought some refurbished 12TB WD Ultrastar Helium drives for my home NAS that were a fraction of the cost of new ones at the time. So far they have performed great. And if one does die, it will be pretty inexpensive to replace it with another refurbished drive. Only problem with those big drives is that they take a LONG time to rebuild when you do need to replace one.
All HDD's take a long time to rebuild when you replace one in a redundant storage. Sure faster drives may rebuild faster, but it's not dramatically faster. So recertified or new doesn't really matter for that. The only way rebuilding drives get faster is if you have SSD drives, and preferably PCIe ones at that as both SATA and SAS is way slower. It's part of the game.
Thinking back many may years, lest call it two or possibly three decades, a customer had a interesting project. They were developing a technique that would allow them to print circuits on plastic film using a sort of inkjet printer. Now it never got anywhere as far as I know, but at the time Nintendo was interested in this as they wanted memory storage for game cartridges that would be about as cheap as optical disks, and this was something they was considering to invest in. Now if it had succeeded it would have made SSD storage a lot cheaper and available a lot earlier than how it all turned out. Performance wouldn't have been anywhere near what we see from flash memory today, but it would still have been a lot better at random access than HDD's.
Oh the things we missed out on. Well I guess that film would have ended up cracking as it aged and the circuits delaminating or something. Probably a good thing we didn't have to suffer through that.
People had all kinds of strange ideas back then. Some worked while others successfully failed.
I did this on a smaller scale. Got 14 24TB recertified drives, running RAID-Z2, and two spares. So far so good!
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!
I actually bought 4 4tb Hard drives on ebay, and now I got it in a portable DAS
Whats a DAS?
Digital Audio Sortage :)
@june_senpai9846 dead array system
@june_senpai9846 Direct Attached Storage, Similar to NAS (Network Attached Storage) but it's just plugged directly into a computer.
@june_senpai9846 a Volkswagen
Man, LTT has the best sponsor spots on YT and I will die on that hill. They do their best to be clever with the introduction and the spots are relatively short. No other channel comes close
I have seen other channels do better, but they're also not coming up with a creative sponsor segment every day
@PJM257 curious, how better? Even the decent ones are usually 3 minutes long of talking points. The only other channel that's decent was donut/big time when they made original content for the ad
9:09 it ain't a expensive LTT video without Linus dropping somthing 🗣️🔥
I bought one of the NetApp DiskShelves back in 2020, for $150 off eBay, when I got interested in setting up a NAS for home and bought 2 recertified 4TB drives with, a 5 year warranty, off Amazon for around $60 bucks each. I already had a couple so it was a good start and by the end of 2020 I had eight 4TB. I bought three 10TB recertified drives last year for $80 each to bump things up and I have had zero problems with the any of the drive thus far! Who knows what I will get next, but will continue looking at the recertified drives! They're a great deal!
Got lucky at a local electronics recycler when they got 6x 16TB exos drives in, all lowish hours and picked them up for 800CAD. Theyve been running smoothly with no issues for 1.5 years now
Heads up, I would NOT recommend the Jonsbo N4 that you flashed at 5:40 . The layout is pretty awful, the drives don't stay cool enough, personally I would not build in it again. It essentially requires some 3D printed parts and some extra cooling fans to work, and most SFX power supplies will need a cable extension for the 24 pin due to the awkward layout.
16:08 Right here is where I was thinking about how it’s also probably worth it to save the money on re-certified, because if you wanted to spend more for the extra 3 years of warranty, you’d possibly miss out on buying new drives at year 4 that cost less and store more as I’m sure there’d be another leap in 5 years time.
It really depends on your use case. If you were cold storing some data, you might want to spend the extra knowing that these haven't been opened up after manufacture (some of the recertified drives have had controllers replaced etc. but AFAIK it isn't the norm).
If you were doing that though, you may as well get tapes and do it properly, but whatev.
@@smalltime0 For cold storage I use the cheapest drives, extra redundancy, and make sure the redundancy is across multiple batches. It seems worth it to get the super cheap drives.
I bought some SAS Seagate Exos 14TB drives for like 100-110 USD each and still working good a year later with no SMART errors in site. Got 3 for my TrueNAS and got loads of storage.
I bought four SATA 18 TB Exos for 550 € total (avg. salary in my country is ~1400 €). I want one off-site and three of them in RAIDZ1 (2+1). I don't know what should I put them in.
Throw them in your pc. Never enough storage when games are 100GB each.
Same here, we run two servers, one a duplicate backup running over 10 of these drives in each and haven't *knocks on wood* had an issue yet over many years. Cheap and effective.
Where do you find them that cheap in Europe? Or they went cheaper recently (haven't checked it)?
Last Seagate drive I had was a 3TB. It started to fail just within warranty, so I went to get it replaced. They sent a "certified refurb" that was in even worse condition right out of the box. I notified them and they promised a manufactured new replacement; when that arrived, it was a completely DoA refurb again. Then they promised a mfr new AGAIN... AND THAT TOTALLY FAILED IN 2 MONTHS. So they replaced THAT drive with a drive that TOTALLY FAILED IN 6 MONTHS. I didn't bother contacting them again and I've convinced several people not to deal with them since. None of my WD HDDs have failed, nor have the ones I've recommended people. Even the used, 20yr+ old IDE HDDs we use for old electronics are either Toshiba or WD. I think it's usually Seagates that we're replacing.
I don't recommend WD SSDs, because they hid how they shut off 2 lanes on a PCIe4x4 SSD in a gen 3 slot. That caused an issue in a mobo that didn't allow 3x2, only 3x4.
1 RMA: 5 bad drives.
Bought a 12TB recertified drive from a company in Singapore about a month ago, put it in a cheap 3.5" enclosure from amazon and connected it to my mini PC. Working brilliantly with my Plex server and its half full now so considering doing the exact same thing with a second one!
Really glad you made this video, I was tired of getting good deals on manufacturer recertified drives. I'm glad I can now pay $100 more per drive after this video.
1:20 do they actually have any "ai" (machine learning) features or are they just another product shoehorning ai into its name
14th gen HX = doesn't have a NPU -> shoehorning
Probably it is just "capable" of doing a.i tasks
Short answer NOP. There are almost no commercially available CPU's or GPU's for that matter that have hardware build agents in them. So it's misleading advertising in it's purest form. // To clarify RTX is not AI, nor software that is optimized to run AI related tasks
To be fair, even AI isn't AI. So it's not any worse than LLM and diffusion models branded as AI. Meaningless term all around. AI still doesn't exist. Part of me kind of thinks it's poetic justice that everyone co-opted the term and made it lose any meaning it had because it didn't have any real meaning to begin with.
I own 90 HGST sas drives and 10 Seagate recertified sas drives. All the drives have been solid over the last 3/4 years. Recertified drives work fine.
I've been buying refurbished HDDs from Server Part Deals for years now. I did receive a bad drive from them once (I always do a block sector check on all new drives as they'll be in some NAS or work environment for years). I emailed their RMA department, showed them the screenshot of the drive results and the bad block. In a day they got back to me, RMA'd the drive and I got a replacement drive a few days later.
So you might get a bad drive but their support is absolutely fantastic when issues come up.
Given that the drives can be less than half the price of a new drive and comes with a few years of warranty, it's a no brainier. Just so a sector scan before installing the drive and a long SMART test.
I've looked specifically at manufacturer recertified drives, but I've held back for two reasons: Money (homelabbing is expensive), which held back the next step and the next reason, figuring out exactly what the manufacturer recertification means.
Thanks for clearning that up :)
Recertified drives used to be hard drives that had fully functional drive mechanisms, but faulty controllers and/or interfaces that were replaced by the manufacturer and re-tested.
3:15 ooOOoo...different batches of drives. This is very good for a RAID setup as all the drives are not from the same batch. Meaning if one drive fails, the others will not fail soon after wards.
1:11 - Hide the pain Jake.
@@dolan-duk he's in pain because it's segate. They are know to fail even brand new.
The Caps Lock tips was the best I've heard in a while. Thanks Jake
I've got about 300TB's worth of recert drives in my homelabs, many have been spinning for 3-4 years with only one drive failure at just under a year. For smaller use cases, keep a drive or two on hand as a cold spare and you'll still save some serious cash.
"Storage ain't cheap" - I mean, for the average user in 2024, it kind of is, relative to what it was 20 years ago. Yeah, if you're a media company, your needs are going to cost way more.
I work in diagnostics...
The issue isn't the cost of storage. As so much more about how much data and the size of files nowadays.
Yeah, it really is their media side. I imagine if they were trying to be efficient they could just compress their bazillion gigs of raw video files to something far more reasonable, or, they could even shoot normal people camera settings with normal people gear and save 1/50th of the storage space but it would look reflect poorly on their company if the videos they produced looked like they came from 2010 😂
But at least they'd have enough storage to do most of the things they mentioned not doing yet
@@maverick9708 agreed... that's the price of them doing a quality job.
However.... I do feel that most of that "data producing" tech can be far more efficient.
I am basically paying the same for storage nowadays as I paid 20 years ago on my first rig. With the distinction that nowadays I never run out of storage or have to uninstall a big game before installing another
Edit: omg, it's 20 years already, not 10-15 as I thought...
@@maverick9708 Honestly, compressing is fools errand.
Can confirm some MSI boards literally will not POST when you slot in a LSI hba controller
Thanks for blowing up my spot, I was about to place an order from these guys... Hopefully they still have stock lol. I love how every 6 month we all do the true nas video 😂
teaching how to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle in ltt is wild, tnx for doing it! ❤
I've gotten a few recertified enterprise drives without issues. Got a set of 4, all different batches, with 3 year warranties, and only 1 has failed in that time, covered by the seller. Pretty good to get the capacity and longer warranties than a true USED drive, and statistically being from different batches does reduce same-time failures
I only buy used 18TB on ebay for my server. Running 32 bays + 2 hot spares. They fail just as randomly and just as often as "new" drives. Some are running for 5+ years now, some only a few thousand hours. It seems to matter very little and i save alot at 10€/TB used vs 20€/TB new.
As you mentioned euros where and what do you buy?
@@blinddarm8478 where are you buying them in Europe ?
I´ve bought numerous recertified drives via Amazon, and they´ve been all sock solid since. Very much worth it as long as you ensure parity with backups (which you should do anyways).
eBay, provided it´s a good local seller is also a solid option, though I prefer the former where possible.
Also just bought 3 12TB Seagate Ironwolfs that are re-certified by Seagate. And so far no issues. And I only paid as much for those 3 as I would have for ONE new
I've had 8 of the same Seagate Exos 20TB recertified drives running on my Qnap nas for some years now. The Qnap garbage broke down, but all the drives are happily continuing their lives in my new Unraid setup. The smart details are still showing zero reallocated sectors, which is great. I'm very happy with these recertificated drives.
5:45 Anybody that's going the repurposed business PC route and wondering what specs they should look for before buying something:
-Light file server: Pretty much anything including SBCs would work but if you're bringing in a new device I'd get something with at least 7th gen intel and room for expandability.
-Media server: i3-8300 or higher, intel's igpus and their media transcoding hardware (quicksync) got significantly better that gen. You won't need a gpu for most cases unless you have a lot of simultaneous users. I recommend HP Prodesk G6 or higher and Lenovo Thinkcentres for compact and low power options. Tons on ebay.
-Huge media server: Consider an Arc GPU to transcode everything to AV1.
-Production/video editing server: Stepping up your budget for something with high speed ethernet and ECC memory support built into the mobo can be worth it for the energy savings and peace of mind. Look around at home server youtubers like Wolfgang's Channel or Jim's Garage for hardware tips.
The beginning sponsor part was pretty good, I didn't see it coming. 01:00
wow this is the earliest i’ve been able to watch a linus upload. this is AWESOME!!!
I've had nothing but problems with Seagate drives for years. Their recertified drives have been the absolute worst. If they work for you folks that's awesome but after losing TBs worth of data repeatedly I vowed to never buy from them again
Same here. Exos are decent though. Still sub par in price/performance to Toshiba but decent.
He could have spent just over twice the price for brand new ssds, this video is as far as i can tell, just to draw people in that see a lot of drives and says wow.
They bought them a year ago, clearly not NEEDED otherwise it would have been done already.
I have had very good results with Exos drives. They are “enterprise” grade but don’t really cost more than similar capacity “NAS” drives and I have found they are more reliable. YMMV of course
They have the worst failure rate at Backblaze. That said the failure rate is still only a few percent per year (instead of less than a percent like other brands), so you do the math and they could still be the best option.
I started my current rendition of my NAS back in 2012 or so with 9x of their 3TB drives. Pretty sure same seller on ebay (or was VERY similar listings, server recertified stuff). Those 9 drives are STILL in use to this day in various rigs around my PC collection. Currently have been rocking 6x 14TB drives, also recertified ebay drives. They've been rocking for 4 years straight, not one hiccup. Every hard drive in my current collection has been recertified drives, haven't had one problem yet. Did have ONE drive fail a zero fill on arrival but the seller sent a replacement immediately.
9:31 Nawk Tuah
When Linus holding those drives and shaking them, that gave me heart attack
He hasn't dropped anything in quite a while so he's probably due.
Don’t worry, I saw none of the bytes fall out! 👍
Thanks Linus! Now I can not spend 10 thousand dollars on a petabyte of storage because I don't have 10 thousand dollars!
5:31
Bro became gru at 0:10
😅
Aint no way
idk why i watch these vids, i know nothing about server stuff but i still watch these vids to the end.
Need more Jake videos. Somehow he is so good at talking way over my head while still explaining in elementary terms that we mere mortals can understand
It's the apocalypse, the internet is gone but trickles of electricity remain. A petabyte drive has been foretold to hold endless amounts of movies and tv shows. It hangs around the neck of the ultimate wasteland warrior, Lionus. (Linus)
but the only show on the drive is Linus Tech Tips
9:15 another one for the compilations
So when's the first zetabyte video?
Probably 2026
I've had great experiences with refurbished PC's that came with amazing drives. Never got drives seperately.
One lesson learned and I'll share here is that a listing for "1 TB of storage" could mean two drives of 500gb each. So be wary of that, that's twice the power consumption and double the heat after all.
Other than that, check what your locals are promising, check if they deliver. And simply make sure to return it and claim your rights if something is off.
Great experiences overall, saved a ton.
seeing that dell bios update screen makes me happy for some reason.. love to see these old nuggets still hanging out
3:31....top tier editing.
6:08 oh yes the joy of windows update
*windows setup
for home projects I have been recommending the WD Easystore external from Best Buy. If you watch the sales you can get up to 20TB for $300 or less. Shuck the drive, you sometimes have to put tape over one of the power connector pin and it works great. WD still warranties them even if they have been removed from the external housing.
I originally bought 2 14TB seagate refurbished drives for my NAS at home through Amazon. Within a few months, one of them died, got my money back and ordered a new one. I didn't register the serial numbers, but quickly another one failed, again got my money back, but now ordered a new 16TB disk from a local company.
The price was also almost a halve more, but I lost trust in refurbished disks. I don't have time to be continously replacing disks, and not all my data is backupped, the risk is also too high for me.
13:20 I always assumed Jake named Tibibytes after himself 😅 turns out it’s a real thing!
12:01 she though it was ocean, it’s just a pool
I've been using SPD for years-just picked up a set of refurb 22TB Exos drives-and have never had a problem. They package them really well and the last few times I've been able to get free second-day air.
I've been running refurb HGST 8TB drives for ~3 years now in my desktop (2 drives) and have had a great experience, so much so that I used the 12TB variant of the same drives, 8 of them, in a RAIDZ2 setup that I did in much the same way as in the video, just in my old desktop and its Fractal Design Define R5. That's been running for ~3 months and has been rock solid as well. 72TB array has been a great upgrade and I wouldn't do anything different if I had to do it again.
Been burned by Seagate so many times, I really don't ever want to try them again.
Every drive if theirs I have used has died abruptly. I quit using Seagate over a decade ago. Never again.
Fyi an avarage human brain has 2.5 petabytes of storage. Still gotta wait for the future to make a storage drive as small as that😅
that makes no sense at all
I've had great success with Seagate drives in RAID. Even the base Barracuda drives, I got a refurb as a warranty replacement and it was rock solid for quite a few years (although it always ran 2c hotter than its neighbours). It did end up dying though.
I got a recertified Seagate 14TB drive from Server Part Deals a few years ago and its still going great. It's also like double the speed of my regular old 2TB hard drives, which I wasn't expecting.
If they die can we call them deadpool 😂😂
I just got 6 recertified 18TB drives from server part deals for my new nas during black friday for $160 each. Then Honey found an LTT coupon for $50 off. I wish the 20TB drives would have still been $180 instead of $222.
4:39 Seatools says 21 hours, so did they not do the 50 hour burn in test? How many hours of that was burn in testing?
Hmm
with 30 Volt 😊
Wait, where does it say they do a 50 hour burn-in?
From what I've got. Seagate never specified the amount of burn-in performed. They only specified the drive won't have more than 50 power on hours.
Linus seems to imply the burn-in involves writing all zeros to the drives.
At 3:47 you can see in the e-mail they agreed to use "tested drives (less than 10 hours)". Also, it says "up to 50", not 50.
I've been using 8 used eBay NAS drives for over 4 years with unRaid. Only one started throwing errors, and the SMART data even reported the drive might fail way back when I first installed it,
I also through some old dissasembled external drives in my NAS for Plex, and those have lasted about 3 years before starting through errors too. They weren't NAS drives and were almost 10 years old, so I was happy with the last of their lives. With 2 parity drives I've been able to swap them out no problem.
One gigabyte of RAM per terabyte of data is a myth that needs to die. How much CPU and RAM you need is completely dependent on your workload and network bandwidth.
Yeah, it sounds no better than the swap = ram/2 myth
Yeah...and with that amount of storage it doesn't matter, network is always the bottleneck (not to mention throwing away perfectly fine xeon board cause you couldn't spend like 100 bucks for xeon cpu that isn't low tier, low core count).
|Music to my ears, I'm setting up a server with 12x8TB and the though of losing 96GB of my 128GB of ram is not fun.
It's a ZFS specific ratio for RAM caching.
@@AnonymousMod. RAM caching depends on your workload and network bandwidth.
6:57 is he yawning?
UH-
nope
Ebay is underrated.
My Plex setup mentioned! Got a refurbished Optiplex with a refurbished enterprise HDD in. Works great, although those drives are loud!
I got one of those recertified Seagate Exos drives almost a year ago. So far, all I can tell is that it is substantially louder than every other drive I have in my server. I assumed that maybe those are just loud in general, and people return them because of this, thinking that they might be a ticking time bomb.
Recertification is done by Seagate themselves? Oh well that should be fine then! Considering that their NEW drives are so well known for only blowing up a year after first deployment.
Edit: If you want more testimony, every hard drive failure I've ever seen myself, for family, for friends, whether it be Desktop, Laptop, Game Console or portable storage device, every single one of them was a Seagate, and they were each no more than 2 years old. Meanwhile my WD Golds are about to be a decade old, outliving the components they were originally built with, and still refuse to quit.
Bad news: it's just chance. Actuarial comparisons put WD and Seagate pretty close to each other in terms of real failure rates ("frequency"). That's true across industry segments but individual product lines may deviate. Source: have worked in data analytics for warranty/insurance/reinsurance companies.
Each manufacturer has failures. I have had Seagates, WDs, and Toshibas last years and years before they start to fail. I've also had some last only a few months. My most recent was a Seagate that started to take a long time to access, but it was over 12 years old and had a ton of restarts and power on hours.
Well time to find $24,000
To be fair, Seagate drives are 'recertified" reliability when they're brand new, at best.
I got a pair of 2TB Constellation ES drives from a similar sort of dealer a little over 5 years back for my system upgrade. (software RAID1 for in-system backups, I can't afford and don't need an external storage system) They have worked flawlessly for 5 years, despite several people on the LTT forums warning me that they would be likely to fail within days. (they also kept trying to push me to get a far more complex backup system than I actually needed) No failures or errors of any kind, and both drives were from the same batch with 0 power-on hours when I received them.