Need desperate advice buying my first HD'S Pickup is this weekend.

[Redux]

Hello,

This is my first entry on this lovely forum but I have been reading and learning for a year of 2 to make my first DIY NAS and a Homelab.

I also Live in the EU so prices are absurd if I see the difference with USA or even other EU countries.

Now my first NAS is made of a HP ProDesk 600 G5 MT, with a Intel i5-9500, 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD for the OS, 250 watt Delta platinum PSU and 4 x 16GB DDR4 3200 MHz ECC UDIMM RAM in it.

Now I have tested and played around with 4 x WD Black 2TB 3.5" drives on it to try and learn different OS ect. Without breaking on accident something expensive.

All werked perfect, now I have a different system server grade made and still in progress but that's a story for later.

I want to use the Prodesk as dedicated NAS with I think I will use Treunas on it.

Now the urgent question decent amount of TB drives are insane with current prices.
After a long time searching I actually found someone local who after talking for 3 weeks about HD'S and stuff he then offered me a set of 6 identical HPE‑branded 10 TB HGST/WD Ultrastar He10 / Ultrastar DC HC510 Build in December 2017 and stayed in stock for a while was used 5 year's and he got the whole set of 12 the all have between 42Kand 46K of hours on them and smart data looks healthy to me.

He keeped for himself 6 of them in a Synology NAS and I can buy the other 6 for €90 each (I think here these days €9/TB is cheap)

But the thing is I am unsure, first time buying this caliber of drives and not the cheap 2TB ones, there build age and also the 46.000 of runtime. If this is really a good deal and I am just not experienced enough with it.

So please I would love any advice if I should buy the drives or not, he was really patient to wait bit for me to search myself but I really don't know and the timer for me of buying them ends this weekend because he has more offers for the drives.

I added the SMART test of the "worse" drive out of the six, because it had a short spike in temperatuur to 59 Celsius.
The other 5 have similar or better Smart data with max temp spike to 42 Celsius.
The averaged of all in lifespan is between 20/25 Celsius.

So Advice is much welcome, is it a good deal for what it is, or should I stay away and not do it?

Greetings from a newbie

 

[nmpu]

Are you just trying to learn or do you have specific storage requirements?

 

[TrevorH]

HGST HC510 10TB drives come in both SAS and SATA variants so you need to make sure that you have the right sort of controller to attach them to. Ebay UK only has the SAS versions listed and pre-owned/refurbished of them and the cheapest is just under £200. If you only have SATA ports then you will also need to buy a SAS controller if these are SAS drives.

 

[Redux]

Are you just trying to learn or do you have specific storage requirements?

I learned mostly with the 4 x WB 2TB drives and trying different OS everything that includes it (mostly on Treunas)
Now I am more comfortable with it.

I will always keep on learning only now I want that system to be a bare metal Truenas with enough storage also for the foorseeing future just to keep working and store data (I can keep 2 drives for example well stored and use just 4 in the nas and would have 2 drives as backup for failure)

So storage wise it is for now more than plenty for my needs, I do however need to digitalize old tape video sometime in the future.

I am however busy with a Lenovo P520 a lot more ways and options to go with it and that's going to be the system I will keep learning and experiment and test everything on.
Just a separate system with lot less trouble to screw the data on a dedicated NAS on up.

At least that's the idea and plan. I'm relatively new to the whole homelab scene and still have a lot to learn.

Also the main question, do you have any advice or thoughts about the 10TB hard drives that I am being offered and would like to have but i don't know if it's in a good enough state?
I don't have any experience with these 3.5" Datacenter/server or NAS drives, only with cheap and simple 1 and 2TB desktop drives.

 

[Redux]

HGST HC510 10TB drives come in both SAS and SATA variants so you need to make sure that you have the right sort of controller to attach them to. Ebay UK only has the SAS versions listed and pre-owned/refurbished of them and the cheapest is just under £200. If you only have SATA ports then you will also need to buy a SAS controller if these are SAS drives.

Thanks for your reply,

The are the SATA version, and with the 2TB drives I tested that system with there are enough SATA ports on the motherboard what worked perfectly fine.


No advice on my burning question about the 10TB drives?

 

[rtech]

I would avoid super old drives such as these. From memory I recall that HDD are generally designed to last at least 7 years after 10 years disks are deemed more like risk for its intended purpose. Storing data. Now supposedly your guy had offered you disks that were sitting on shelf for 4/5 years even if that is true disks are mechanical devices with finite life. Bearing lubricant, Helium fill, dust ingress all these factors which adversely effect drive longevity are at work even if HDDs are stored.

 

[Redux]

Thank you for your reply!

And indeed this is something I have read about, so I asked about this situation about the hard disks.

The build date on them is december 2017, so begin 2018 is safe to say.
He bought a complete system with all included he needed that was with these drives in it all from HP directly. This was few months in to halfway 2020.
He had it running until he bought new hardware in sections not all at ones from different brands at the end of 2025 to beginning 2026 in steps because ofcourse the warranty was about to expire.
Then came the drives also free, and if you check the online numbers it exactly matched the dates. So the have been on from factory stock for 5 year's straight en now replaced being offered.

This person lives 15 min drive away from me and show me the dates and paperwork and also some hardware of HP left the serial codes matched online with his paperwork and story. So the where basically from brand new (only 2 year in HP stock) placed by HP in the system he bought and the drives have run after that continuesly, or atleast On/idle. And every date seen and showed also online with HP confirmes the dates. And the dates from begin use to fasing them out after the 5 year's
Also it confirmes if you calculate the hours on time showed on the drives precise back to the month it was delivered, installed and everything was running.
All this backed up completely from a lot of verified sources.

That made me doubt, because the only one that kept it in stock was HP 2 years when the where new, after the where on for 5 and a little bit years till all was replaced and that was the moment I got offered half the drives, the other ones he placed in his private Synology Nas as replacement.

So that makes it difficult and I checked and verified it Al I could and he allowed it.

So that's why especially for these days with absurd storage prices €9 per TB is very cheap. In my country company's sell the same drives (als older) with 67K hours on it for €140 and the batch is sold in days...

So bad moment for me to get hard drives now and have to get firtshand experience with these types of drives. But with all the verification I did and was allowed was correct, and seeing company's selling them even for €140 with 67k hours I really don't know it anymore
That's why he waited for me to figure it out on my own, and I don't ask first to others and get spoon-feed and search maybe later.
I spend a lot of time researching and verifying things, almost obsessively dedicating every spare moment to this. However, this often leads me to seek advice from experts quite late, usually right before the timer expires. In this particular instance, the seller had already waited much longer than anyone else would do and set the last date for me to buy before he decided to sell it to some other people who had already offered him good money for those drives.

So respect for him the seller for that.

And again bad from my side I waited again to long to ask people who work in the field and have years of experience and also more know how ect...

So yeah, a nice first questions and topic to start here in this forum.
And in a lot of doubt..

 

[is39]

I think it's a good deal nowadays ;-(

HC510 are decent drives (though I do not know of a published reliability stats, like Backblaze has for a number of other models); but most other HGST models were better or at par with competition. I would expect at least ~5 more years out of those. If you're not shooting towards specific max capacity, I'd recommend using RAIDZ2; it's a bit of a waste with only 4 drives, but gives you extra drive to lose; RAIDZ1 is ok if you've backups (and have time to rebuild).

HP branding (MB010000GWAYN) gives me a pause, with regard to firmware access; but it's quite rare you'd need it, plus it seems HPG5 is latest version; HPG4 has a bad bug: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00051852en_us