Comment by malfist
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
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
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.
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/...