Comment by jabart
Every drive is "used" the moment you turn it on.
Every drive is "used" the moment you turn it on.
Enterprise drives are way different than anything consumer based. I wouldn't trust a consumer drive used for 2 years, but a true enteprise drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.
Quote from Toshiba's paper on this. [1]
Hard disk drives for enterprise server and storage usage (Enterprise Performance and Enterprise Capacity Drives) have MTTF of up to 2 million hours, at 5 years warranty, 24/7 operation. Operational temperature range is limited, as the temperature in datacenters is carefully controlled. These drives are rated for a workload of 550TB/year, which translates into a continuous data transfer rate of 17.5 Mbyte/s[3]. In contrast, desktop HDDs are designed for lower workloads and are not rated or qualified for 24/7 continuous operation.
From Synology
With support for 550 TB/year workloads1 and rated for a 2.5 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF), HAS5300 SAS drives are built to deliver consistent and class-leading performance in the most intense environments. Persistent write cache technology further helps ensure data integrity for your mission-critical applications.
[1] https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/content/dam/toshiba-ss-v...
[2] https://www.synology.com/en-us/company/news/article/HAS5300/...
Take a look at backblaze data stats. Consumer drives are just as durable, if not more so than enterprise drives. The biggest thing you're getting with enterprise drives is a longer warranty.
If you're buying them from the second hand market, you don't likely get the warranty (and is likely why they're on the second hand market)
There isn’t a significant difference between “enterprise” and “consumer” in terms of fundamental characteristics. They have different firmware and warranties, usually disks are tested more methodically.
Max operating range is ~60C for spinning disks and ~70C for SSD. Optimal is <40-45C. The larger agents facilties afaik tend to run as hot as they can.
> drive has like millions of hours left of it's life.
It doesn't apply for the single drive, only for a large number of drives. E.g. if you have 100000 drives (2.4 million hours MTTF) in a server building with the required environmental conditions and maximum workload, be prepared to replace a drive once a day in average.
datablocks.dev has a page explaining what white label and recertified disks are [1]. Those are not disks used for years under heavy load.
1: https://datablocks.dev/blogs/news/white-label-vs-recertified...
Drive failure rate versus age is a U-shaped curve. I wouldn't distrust a used drive with healthy performance and SMART parameters.
And you should use some form of redundancy/backups anyway. It's also a good idea to not use all disks from the same batch to avoid correlated failures.
There's a big difference between used as in I just bought this hard drive and have used it for a week in my home server, and used as in refurbished drive after years of hard labor in someone else's server farm