I'm going to be as brief as possible.
3 years ago I planned to overhaul my data storage backend replacing all my drives with enterprise SSDs, as the computers in my house were (And still are) using quite old HDs, and I had not enough spare capacity to do full backups. Since SSDs have a naturally high lifespan if not heavily writed to, used enterprise SSDs seemed to be perfect for what I wanted since most times they served as cheap, high quality drives with tons of endurance left, making them inherently better than consumer SSDs. Alternatively, I considered putting all these SSDs in a single machine and making a ZFS NAS, according to what the available Hardware allowed me to do and what was more convenient.
I was going to purchase some stuff from an user here after figuring out I can't chase any of the things posted in Great Deals, but the deal went down because my country got hit with a 100% devaluation in a two weeks period while I still figured out the shipping details and custom office paperwork, thus I ended up doing nothing. The next time I had money on hand, I spended on a pair of GPUs to mine Ethereum. Now my old Seagate 4 TB HD, which I purchased in 2013, is throwing critical SMART errors, and needs a replacement (Besides that while all the critical stuff has a backup, many non-critical things that are still valuable do not due to lack of storage capacity. I still didn't really tested what can be recovered due to not having where to put all that, will deal with that AFTER gearing up), so it is a good time to fix this once and for all.
However, with the emergence of Chia pretty much completely disrupting the used enterprise SSD market, I'm currently at a loss regarding what to do. My current alternatives are:
1 - Locally purchase standard consumer grade SSDs and call it a day. This is the path of least resistance
2 - Pestering people here to get me a quick overview of what is currently available until I find something affordable and workable
So far, I don't know what are the current go-to SSDs models. Most of the old ones I knew of are, well, old, and I suppose that currently there may be other or better things available. Also, the fact that I have to be constantly looking for deals when big servers decomissions happens also makes them hard to get.
For one, I know that whereas previously purchasing used enterprise SSDs was mostly safe because most high endurance units were still good even if decently worn, Chia changed that so now it seems that I need to check far better who sells them and ask for SMART status and endurance left, so vendor seems to matter much more than previously. Also saw that there are several SSDs that seems to brick themselves after certain uptime if you don't apply a Firmware update, and also OEMs models that have no public support whatsover. Thus I know that there are a lot of things to avoid, but not what is left after accounting for those.
Typically, I always aimed at some used enterprise SATA SSDs like the Intel S3500 line, albeit I'm also interesed in a SAS HBA and SSDs if price is right. Anything M.2/U.2 is out of question because I'm on a Xeon E3 Haswell platform, so NVMe requires adapters and BIOS modding. So what are my current alternatives without breaking the bank? I'm looking for around 4-8 TB in total capacity. Price is an important factor, but since I don't know the current status of the SSD market, I first need to have some form of anchor price.
3 years ago I planned to overhaul my data storage backend replacing all my drives with enterprise SSDs, as the computers in my house were (And still are) using quite old HDs, and I had not enough spare capacity to do full backups. Since SSDs have a naturally high lifespan if not heavily writed to, used enterprise SSDs seemed to be perfect for what I wanted since most times they served as cheap, high quality drives with tons of endurance left, making them inherently better than consumer SSDs. Alternatively, I considered putting all these SSDs in a single machine and making a ZFS NAS, according to what the available Hardware allowed me to do and what was more convenient.
I was going to purchase some stuff from an user here after figuring out I can't chase any of the things posted in Great Deals, but the deal went down because my country got hit with a 100% devaluation in a two weeks period while I still figured out the shipping details and custom office paperwork, thus I ended up doing nothing. The next time I had money on hand, I spended on a pair of GPUs to mine Ethereum. Now my old Seagate 4 TB HD, which I purchased in 2013, is throwing critical SMART errors, and needs a replacement (Besides that while all the critical stuff has a backup, many non-critical things that are still valuable do not due to lack of storage capacity. I still didn't really tested what can be recovered due to not having where to put all that, will deal with that AFTER gearing up), so it is a good time to fix this once and for all.
However, with the emergence of Chia pretty much completely disrupting the used enterprise SSD market, I'm currently at a loss regarding what to do. My current alternatives are:
1 - Locally purchase standard consumer grade SSDs and call it a day. This is the path of least resistance
2 - Pestering people here to get me a quick overview of what is currently available until I find something affordable and workable
So far, I don't know what are the current go-to SSDs models. Most of the old ones I knew of are, well, old, and I suppose that currently there may be other or better things available. Also, the fact that I have to be constantly looking for deals when big servers decomissions happens also makes them hard to get.
For one, I know that whereas previously purchasing used enterprise SSDs was mostly safe because most high endurance units were still good even if decently worn, Chia changed that so now it seems that I need to check far better who sells them and ask for SMART status and endurance left, so vendor seems to matter much more than previously. Also saw that there are several SSDs that seems to brick themselves after certain uptime if you don't apply a Firmware update, and also OEMs models that have no public support whatsover. Thus I know that there are a lot of things to avoid, but not what is left after accounting for those.
Typically, I always aimed at some used enterprise SATA SSDs like the Intel S3500 line, albeit I'm also interesed in a SAS HBA and SSDs if price is right. Anything M.2/U.2 is out of question because I'm on a Xeon E3 Haswell platform, so NVMe requires adapters and BIOS modding. So what are my current alternatives without breaking the bank? I'm looking for around 4-8 TB in total capacity. Price is an important factor, but since I don't know the current status of the SSD market, I first need to have some form of anchor price.
