Used HGST He10 drives -- good value?

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MyCoR

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May 14, 2019
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I bought a 5-bay Sabrent DS-SC5B enclosure and a "TinyMiniMicro" to pair with it. Enclosure is USB 3.1 10Gbps. I'm going to use TrueNAS scale and set up a 5-disk raidz2. Since I'm limited to 5 disks, in the interest of making this as small as possible, I'm looking at larger drives.

Are there brands or specific sizes I should avoid? I can buy 5x HGST 8TB drives for around $600. I want to spend under $1000 for the drives.

I don't know if the enclosure supports the power-disable feature of these enterprise drives, but IIRC a bit of tape over one pin will make them work.

If you were limited to 5 drives for a very modest storage pool, what would you choose? Thanks for any help or tips

**EDIT** To be more specific, the drives I'm talking about are "HGST Ultrastar He10 HUH721008ALE600" and "HGST Ultrastar HUH728080ALE601" listed as seller refurbished on eBay. They go from about $110 - 120 ea. and claim no bad sectors.
 
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Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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Are the drives new or used?

If used drive, is it still under warranty?

$14-$15 per TB for new WD external drives are normal price.
 

MyCoR

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The drives are "refurbished" server drives on ebay, with warranties, from the RESELLERS. Also, further reading into the power-disable feature has revealed that not all of these drives are 4K sector drives, which I would assume I want for large drives.

$14 per TB isn't bad, I'll look into shucking drives as well.
 

Marsh

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Check the great deal part of the forum.

About 2-3 weeks ago, 10TB HGST SAS drives for $99.
I picked up 12 x 10TB drives, used a $15 Adaptec sas card.
Drives are humming along.
 
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MyCoR

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I have to use SATA with my enclosure. I may be overthinking the 4K vs 512e thing, as I'm not expecting a ton of performance out of a 5 drive array anyway.

8TB HGST SATA drives seem to be available at around $100 on ebay, might just try those.
 

zer0sum

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Mar 8, 2013
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I have to use SATA with my enclosure. I may be overthinking the 4K vs 512e thing, as I'm not expecting a ton of performance out of a 5 drive array anyway.

8TB HGST SATA drives seem to be available at around $100 on ebay, might just try those.
SAS drives tend to be a bit more of a bargain if you can work out a way for your chassis to support them.
If it's just hotswap how often do you really use that?

This is a pretty cool site - Disk Prices (US)

Or this one - ShuckStop
 
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Labs

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Mar 21, 2019
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I also bought some He10 used SAS drives and 2 of them had many reallocated sectors and the seller replaced them.
After 2 months one drive failed in a strange way that I cannot even see the SMART values.

I guess it's about luck with "refurbished" drives. An eBay reseller what can it refurbish in the end?! He can do at most a low level format and a SMART test but from what I saw they don't even bother with this.

It's not like the factory refurbished drives where all components are tested and SMART looks like it's a new drive.
 
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nabsltd

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I may be overthinking the 4K vs 512e thing, as I'm not expecting a ton of performance out of a 5 drive array anyway.
5 modern drives in a RAID-5 (so, 4 data drives) can easily give you 500MB/sec sequential read and close to that in write. My desktop has an Adaptec 6805 and 5x WD RE2 SATA drives, and you can see that it's pretty much the same sequential speeds as the Crucial MX500 SSD (6Gbps SATA connection) in the same box.

Add in as little as 64GB of SSD/NVME as cache, and you'll get almost SSD performance for many common workloads.
 

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MyCoR

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5 modern drives in a RAID-5 (so, 4 data drives) can easily give you 500MB/sec sequential read and close to that in write. My desktop has an Adaptec 6805 and 5x WD RE2 SATA drives, and you can see that it's pretty much the same sequential speeds as the Crucial MX500 SSD (6Gbps SATA connection) in the same box.

Add in as little as 64GB of SSD/NVME as cache, and you'll get almost SSD performance for many common workloads.
Thanks for giving me that info, this is my first time setting something like this up so I wasn't sure what to expect. The drives are connected to the NAS via 10Gbps USB, which isn't much faster than your 5 drive raid array. (thought there would be much more headroom}.


I also bought some He10 used SAS drives and 2 of them had many reallocated sectors and the seller replaced them.
After 2 months one drive failed in a strange way that I cannot even see the SMART values.

I guess it's about luck with "refurbished" drives. An eBay reseller what can it refurbish in the end?! He can do at most a low level format and a SMART test but from what I saw they don't even bother with this.

It's not like the factory refurbished drives where all components are tested and SMART looks like it's a new drive.
Did the seller guarantee no bad sectors, or did they just wipe? I was kind of more worried about "factory" recertified drives because they wipe the SMART data and you can't tell how old the drive actually is.

HDDs are expensive enough, and the savings is large enough, that I am pretty sure I'm going to rill the dice and get refurbished/used drives. It is part of the reason I'm using ZFS as well, with Raidz2. If I have a drive failure that will give me a chance to learn how to rebuild the array. I'm going to backup the data I really need of course.

I also considered the shucking route, but the fact that you can't tell what kind of drive you might get, CMR vs SMR etc, made me wary of doing it.
 

StanLee

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Apr 10, 2022
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AFAIK, refurbished equipment on eBay often only means 'removed & now reselling'. Even if its Enterprise HW refurbished by a company with locations in multiple states, this usually means its removed, allegedly tested, and sold.

If you have a company name to go on, I suggest you check online with the Better Business Bureau for the appropriate state, job websites, etc. to get a better idea of how they operate as a company & how they treat/pay their workers to set your expectations. The former tells you if the procedures & warranty are any good. The latter has a lot to do with how well the workers do their job. HW is usually fragile, and a drive might test fine (assuming it is tested) then be roughly handled & ruined before shipping. 'Must have been the Fed Ex guy who ruined it!'

People who are poorly paid & treated tend to have less pride in doing their job, and companies that do that -- and don't worry about high employee turnover -- probably don't care about doing other things right. At best, they rely on most HW working past 30 days & replacing what they have to as cheaper than doing things right from the start. Remember, refurb in a 1st world country is competing with recycling in a 3rd world country: That is what could have happened to this HW, and good employees cost money.

I've bid on stuff from companies like this, but haven't won any yet, but it's been kind of cringe-worthy. The employee reviews of the places were really eye opening. But at least something is going to get shipped, as opposed to an empty box.
 

Labs

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Mar 21, 2019
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Did the seller guarantee no bad sectors, or did they just wipe? I was kind of more worried about "factory" recertified drives because they wipe the SMART data and you can't tell how old the drive actually is.
The seller only said the drives are OK and "seller refurbished". He didn't even post any accumulated hours for the drives. I did a hex editor check on the drives and they were not wiped. They were part of some array because I saw some headers there. I didn't bother to check more and I made a low level format by myself and also a long SMART test and both passed but they failed after.

Normally they know the unit was in "production" so they consider it fully working so they dismantle it and sell it for parts as "fully working".
I also had issues with new WD drives and it was much more trouble to ask for RMA from WD than from the eBay seller.
 

nickf1227

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Sep 23, 2015
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I just recently bought 3 10TB drives from this seller on ebay
HUH721010AL4200/42C0 HGST Ultrastar He10 10TB 7200RPM SAS 12Gbps 256MB 2018 | eBay

I added them as an additional pool in my TrueNAS box in addition to a pool of 6 10TB WD drives I shucked that cost between 120-180 a piece as they were bought at different times. I was upset because 2 of them in the later purchase were not helium drives, and I didn't want to buy more non helium drives.

Pretty good value and are definitely faster than the drives I shucked.