Toshiba 14TB SAS MG07SCA14TE 512e $66 NEW

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odditory

Moderator
Dec 23, 2010
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That's why I buy used drives at 33% of new prices. My RMA process is to grab one of the extra drives I bought and replace the dead drive.
Smart man. DIY replacements has been my strat since at least 2007 (for home storage anyway, not in a business), as once you are dealing in enough quantity then there's a crossover point where you're overpaying for warranty if cheaper variants are available.

Person A buys 20 x WD Reds for $300/ea (5yr warranty) = $6000
Person B buys 20 x WD Externals for $200/ea and voids 2yr warranty shucking = $4000

Person B could buy 30 drives for what Person A paid for 20, and have 10 sitting on the shelf as cold spares. Or buy 25 drives, keep 5 on the shelf for replacements, and save $1000. This isn't shining a light on anything previously unknown, but it's one way to go.

Some will argue "but a drive with a 5 year warranty must be inherently better quality since the manufacturer has high confidence in it." And that's not necessarily true, for reasons too boring to get into.
 

Jaket

Active Member
Jan 4, 2017
261
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Seattle, New York
purevoltage.com
Smart man. DIY replacements has been my strat since at least 2007 (for home storage anyway, not in a business), as once you are dealing in enough quantity then there's a crossover point where you're overpaying for warranty if cheaper variants are available.

Person A buys 20 x WD Reds for $300/ea (5yr warranty)

Person B buys 20 x WD Externals for $200/ea and voids 2yr warranty shucking

Person B could buy 30 drives for what Person A paid for 20, and have 10 sitting on the shelf as cold spares. Or buy 25 drives, keep 5 on the shelf for replacements, and save $1000. This isn't shining a light on anything previously unknown, but it's one way to go.

Some will argue "but a drive with a 5 year warranty must be inherently better quality since the manufacturer has high confidence in it." And that's not necessarily true, for reasons too boring to get into.
Yup and then you will have people like some of our clients who will complain about a NVMe drive being 5 years old but having 99% life on it. :)

It's quite interesting even for business clearly enterprise drives are more suggested when ordering. However, quite often you will find some killer deals and we will see some people complain if a drive has 24 hours on it that it's not "new" others don't care if they have 10k hours+


From all of my years in computers and server hosting I have to say failure rates 95% of the time come from super low usage / new drives the other 5% come from power surges.
 

nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
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Yup and then you will have people like some of our clients who will complain about a NVMe drive being 5 years old but having 99% life on it.
I think almost every business vastly over-buys on NVMe endurance, which is why we get to buy those 5-year-old drives on eBay.

This is especially true in a distributed storage system with an NVMe in each node, and the NVMe is only used for ingest from clients, and not for the data protection scheme (i.e., copying the data to multiple nodes). With 10 nodes each having just a 6.4TB NVMe with 3DWPD, that's 192TB per day new/changed data written to the storage (assuming the writes are balanced across all the nodes). If each of those nodes have 480TB of raw storage, you will completely fill all the storage in less than a month, and the NVMe will have 99.986% of life remaining. The only way to wear out a 3DWPD NVMe is to have at least 1000x as much storage as the size of the NVMe.

One "ingest" node having the only NVMe, and lots of storage behind it (racks of JBOD, etc.), then you could conceivably wear out a 3DWPD before the warranty expires, but it's still going to require 2-3PB of storage per TB of NVMe.
 
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ano

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Nov 7, 2022
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I think almost every business vastly over-buys on NVMe endurance, which is why we get to buy those 5-year-old drives on eBay.

This is especially true in a distributed storage system with an NVMe in each node, and the NVMe is only used for ingest from clients, and not for the data protection scheme (i.e., copying the data to multiple nodes). With 10 nodes each having just a 6.4TB NVMe with 3DWPD, that's 192TB per day new/changed data written to the storage (assuming the writes are balanced across all the nodes). If each of those nodes have 480TB of raw storage, you will completely fill all the storage in less than a month, and the NVMe will have 99.986% of life remaining. The only way to wear out a 3DWPD NVMe is to have at least 1000x as much storage as the size of the NVMe.

One "ingest" node having the only NVMe, and lots of storage behind it (racks of JBOD, etc.), then you could conceivably wear out a 3DWPD before the warranty expires, but it's still going to require 2-3PB of storage per TB of NVMe.
the pain/cost of having to replace worn drives would far outweigh the cost imho, also if you end up using for more than 5 years, its sooo nice. we still got SM863a's in prod! just recycled as boot drives for new systems, and misc lab stuff etc.

our ceph nvme db/wal drives, for a large number of OSD, do get to put in work though, much more than vsan or anything else
 
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nabsltd

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Jan 26, 2022
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the pain/cost of having to replace worn drives would far outweigh the cost imho, also if you end up using for more than 5 years, its sooo nice. we still got SM863a's in prod! just recycled as boot drives for new systems, and misc lab stuff etc.
Most companies buy a pre-built box from Dell, HP, Cisco, etc., and when it becomes too underpowered, dump the whole thing and get a new box.

We then buy the parts from the salvage company that paid pennies on the dollar for the old hardware.
 
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Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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I purchased 4 "clean" Toshiba HD ( not grade B) , hoping for lower POH drives.

I received the 4 HD 15 min ago, All 4 HD looks like new and clean.

POH , 3 drives are 36K hrs ( 4years) , 1 drive is 24K hrs ( 2.7 years ).
Not sure it worth the extra $$ for clean drives.

I may buy 8 more Grade B drives from the seller using their online shop.
 

ribroc

ebay hardware hobbyist
Feb 16, 2022
23
25
13
Update:
Grade B drives.
These all seem to be from about april of 2019, Average Power hours varies between 35k and 38k so they've had a life.
My concern from the cut labels only grows, the case damage is deep within "someone keyed my car!" territory.

Compared to the 12TB drives that have a 5yr ebay refurb promise for $80, I think I've got to vote that this is a pretty bad deal by comparison, even at a $65 bulk price.

A warning if people order via the website instead of ebay:
Restocking Fee

Returns of product, other than with defect, are subject to a 20% restocking fee. This will be deducted from your refund. We also do not refund the original shipping and handling that you paid on the order.

Code:
Manufactured in week 16 of year 2019
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  20
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  20
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0    8198295.010           0
write:         0        3         0         0          0      37171.280           0
verify:        0     1322         0         0          0    3206192.625           0

Non-medium error count:        0

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Background short  Completed                   -   38876                 - [-   -    -]
 
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MountainBofh

Beating my users into submission
Mar 9, 2024
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Update:
Grade B drives.
These all seem to be from about april of 2019, Average Power hours varies between 35k and 38k so they've had a life.
My concern from the cut labels only grows, the case damage is deep within "someone keyed my car!" territory.

Compared to the 12TB drives that have a 5yr ebay refurb promise for $80, I think I've got to vote that this is a pretty bad deal by comparison, even at a $65 bulk price.

A warning if people order via the website instead of ebay:



Code:
Manufactured in week 16 of year 2019
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  20
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  20
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0    8198295.010           0
write:         0        3         0         0          0      37171.280           0
verify:        0     1322         0         0          0    3206192.625           0

Non-medium error count:        0

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Background short  Completed                   -   38876                 - [-   -    -]
Eeeek, that smart data is concerning :oops:
 

zdude

What is a Computer?
Aug 29, 2017
63
9
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Got all 5 of the ones I ordered, all 5 had about 36k POH. While the labels are cut, the damage is only cosmetic.
 

nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
568
402
63
the damage is only cosmetic ?
On the drives I received, the 2mm-thick case is scratched about 0.1mm deep, which is purely cosmetic.

The SMART data on my drives also showed that these drives were essentially put into service right after they were manufactured in 2019, and run until not very long ago. There are no fields in the SMART data that are even close to worrisome...no sectors were re-allocated, no uncorrected errors, no retries on read or write, etc.

Eeeek, that smart data is concerning
No, it's not. Bytes written and read on spinning rust are not indicators of drive health. And, 1 ECC correction in every 4 billion verify operations is nothing. For total operations, ECC kicks in once every 16 billion operations. That's exactly what ECC is supposed to do.

Some of the other numbers (like load/unload and power cycle) are good indicators of drive health, and 20 is nothing compared to the 50,000 rating.
 

Zombielinux

Member
Jun 14, 2019
73
23
8
I can validate @nabsltd 's experience.

Mine came with either no scratch or a very light one. All powered up and are running without issue in my cluster.

EDIT: I spoke too soon, one of the drives is reporting "SMART Health Status: Servo impending failure drive error rate too high [asc=5d, ascq=41]"

I'm running a SMART long test now, but it seems this particular drive has mfg warranty until next tuesday.
 
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nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
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This listing is already sold out, but at $64 shipped, maybe it's a sign that prices are dropping:
 

numanumani

New Member
Mar 26, 2022
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3
This listing is already sold out, but at $64 shipped, maybe it's a sign that prices are dropping:
Maybe. I'm guessing that it's a one-off. There are many mistakes in the item description of that so I even question if they were new, as listed.
 

nabsltd

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2022
568
402
63
There are more available for $66 shipped:
 
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MountainBofh

Beating my users into submission
Mar 9, 2024
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There are more available for $66 shipped:
God, you're going to cost me $500... I am so damn tempted to get 8 of these and some cabling (already got a LSI 3008 in the server, just would need to flash it to IT mode)......
 

frameshift18

Member
Jan 9, 2019
44
42
18
God, you're going to cost me $500... I am so damn tempted to get 8 of these and some cabling (already got a LSI 3008 in the server, just would need to flash it to IT mode)......
Lucky for you they are already gone lol.

Edit: Seems seller is/was adding additional stock.
 
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