"Weird" drives on Ebay - cheap bargains if you can work with them?

[86turbodsl]

There's a lot of drives on ebay that are not the common typical SATA desktop drives.

From the somewhat common 520byte drives to SMR drives, etc.
What are ways to leverage these things into cheap big storage?

For instance, i see a lot of Netapp drives for sale for cheap. And the aforementioned 520's.
I know 520's can be reformated low level. Can anything be done with the netapps? What else is out there?
I would like to get significantly below the ~6-10 dollar/Tb level that seems hard to do right now.

 

[CyklonDX]

you'd need to link to a specific drive; SMR typically = garbage for large storage, doesn't play well with zfs.

 

[86turbodsl]

Here's an example: NetApp X318A-R6 8TB 12Gb/s 128MB SAS HDD HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080AL5204 | eBay

the info i can find on Netapp drives is they are "weird". And don't respond to normal commands.

Another would be the 520byte sector drives which i can't find an example of at the moment.

 

[cesmith9999]

Smr drives and NetApp don't mix well.

They did not work well with regular disks. Wafl...

Chris

 

[CyklonDX]

Here's an example: NetApp X318A-R6 8TB 12Gb/s 128MB SAS HDD HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080AL5204 | eBay

the info i can find on Netapp drives is they are "weird". And don't respond to normal commands.

Another would be the 520byte sector drives which i can't find an example of at the moment.

Those are not SMR, but CMR and you can format them to 4096.
This is a ok price for 8tb sas hdd.

8TB ones with 4kn tend to cost around 35-50 usd depending on their smart state, i suspect smart state isn't great - thats why the price is 35ish.
(i have like 8 on stock myself @ Home, they are worth pennies now - not even worth to ship/sell ~ the 12T disks almost sell for same price.)

~ been replacing all my 8TB HGST's with larger disks (especially since you can get brand-new 18T toshiba sas 4kn cmr disk for 190 usd -> those come from same factory as old HGST used to Toshiba MG09 MG09SCP18TA HDEPYA0SMB51 18TB 7.2K RPM SAS 12Gb/s 4Kn SED 3.5in HDD | eBay)

 

[Whaaat]

Can anything be done with the netapps

Last Netapp drive I bought was He12 with NA01 FW, 512b and it refused to accept generic FW and to be reformatted into 4k. Crap. I would rather buy Oracle or EMC version.

 

[86turbodsl]

That's the sort of stuff i'm afraid of. Maybe better to just pony up and buy fewer.