Hey,
i try to build a special Raspberry Node. For this I try to spend not to much money.
I want to ask you, if you would buy used WD Reds whit 35000h for 65€/~70$ each or would you only use new ones?
I bought such an old one from WD directly, works just fine since a few years.
Buying used would be like a gamble with your node’s data. I wouldn’t risk it.
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But buying new hardware for STORJ might not be profitable in years…
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It’s my personal opinion generally about hardware. Also I have complete faith in this project 
Of course. Generally I would never buy used HDDs for my Computer either.
But for STORJ I’d do it if they are considerably cheaper.
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It depends really. I have bought used drives for v2 (used without RAID ), I have also bought used drives (15kRPM and WD VelociRaptor 10kRPM) for my own use, but I use them in an array (RAID1, RAID10 or RAID6).
So far, two VelociRaptors have failed, but they were used in my router - cooling was not that great and they had a decent load. They both developed a lot of bad sectors, but not in the same place, so I did not have to restore from backups. The “new” ones work well, but the load now is also lower.
I probably would not buy a used high capacity desktop-grade drive though.
If given a choice between a used server-grade drive or a new desktop-grade drive (especially one of the cheapest models), I’d probably buy the server-grade drive.
WD Red with a decent SMART report, sure, why not.
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Thanks for all of these replays.
Yeah just for Storj a WD Red. Not for my Desktop.
New price for one is here 99€ and a used one 65€.
If I would buy two i can get them for 125€.
So, if you say for Storj it should be enough and the 35.000H a no probelm, maybe i will try it
So is buying new. Actually, HDDs have their highest chance of failure during their FIRST year of use, which means that for the next 12 months, a 35000h WDC Red is less likely to fail than any newly bought drive.
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@MadeInGermany, i have been in Germany for a 5+ years and You have 2 great places for hardware shopping: ebay.de and computeruniverse.de! 1. I see no point buying dedicated EQ for storj if you have nothing what is even close to minimal requirement; 2. For 65 euros there are lots of great deals on ebay.de from resellers with new HW, so if you buy, buy new one, in case of failure - you will have at-least replacement for next 24 month. If looking into amount of GB per Euro - at the moment traffic is too low to keep nodes online with hundreds of TB spinning for nothing, So start with small and slowly grow big.
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In my opinion buying a used hard drive could be the same gamble as a brand new hard drive, They both can fail but less chances with buying new vs old because you dont know how many hours it was running for. My first node that I ran was a 1TB hard drive that was probably 7 years old or so maybe older and its still running strong. But with hard drives you just never know they really could be a luck of the draw it may payout or it may not, Its a chance you even have to take with a brand new hard drive these days.
^ is worth the extra $$ for me. Also it has more resell value than used one.
Exactly. There are some cases where price is worth risk, but when the price difference between new and used is 10/15%. Used just make no sense.
Yup its always worth spending the extra bucks to buy a brand new hard drive vs a used one because old hard drives, will for sure fail and you will be at a total loss. I would always buy brand new or use my own old hard drives. I always test them to make sure they have no failing sectors, But I had a brand new hard drive die in 3 months or so but it was a really bad brand.
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I bought used 6TB and 3TB WD black drives recently. Both had clean SMART reports and I ran a read+write surface test of both that reported no errors.
The 6TB drive is still going strong. The 3TB drive died about a week after I bought it – looks like controller failure since the drive won’t respond to any commands.
Both are out of the manufacturer’s warranty period. My advice would be to never buy used hard drives unless you have the serial number and can verify the warranty is still active for at least some number of months.
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One thing I learned that the smart reports can be clean and reset if someone is trying to hide something in a hard drive they will. But you might of gotten lucky.
It is possible, though both reports showed a reasonable number of power-on hours. Regardless, I know that the SMART report is not an indicator of good health (only bad) which is why I additionally ran the surface tests. I had a 3-day period to return the drives as defective but with good surface tests I thought everything was reasonably fine. 