A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

    So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.


  • Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

    For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

    Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.








  • 56 here, I discovered and was blasting through first season last Summer when I realized that was the only season so far so I started pacing myself… and then all the crap came down about it being cancelled and I was flabbergasted. I mean yeah it’s an animated series, that doesn’t mean it’s ONLY for children. Hell look at how many animated shows Star Wars has and I would never expect something “Bad Batch” to be marketed as a kids show. Prodigy feels more like DS9 to me, showing the really dark side of the Federation and things that slip through the cracks, it’s not the typical show where everything gets wrapped up in the last five minutes and you move on to the next episode, and I really love that. Hopefully it will get picked up for more seasons but meanwhile I’m taking my time going through the episodes.