What do you think about buying second hand disks and using higher redundancy?

For example 4x 16TB in RAIDz2? Is anyone using something like that? How’s it performing, reliability-wise?

E: Thanks all for the opinions and information!

  • @randombullet@feddit.de
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    310 months ago

    I have 2 x 20tb mirrored for hot storage

    2 pools x 3 x 20tb in Z1 for warm backup.

    And I have 2 x 14tb for cold storage

    2 x 18tb at a remote location

    All are refurbished drives

    • archomrade [he/him]
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      110 months ago

      There seems to be two types of homelabbers with regards to storage:

      • Those who take storage redundancy seriously
      • Those who don’t seem to care

      I’ve made the mistake of asking the second group what they thought about types and quantities of storage, and I got quite a few “why are you concerned?” type questions. My guess is that they regard obtaining data to be free/trivial, so storing it redundantly is a pointless cost. I’ll just say that I don’t share their cavalier attitude.

      This setup is my personal goal, and I think refurbished drives are the best way to go about it (provided they are reasonably taken care of). If you’re working in a redundant setup, the age of the drives matters a lot less.