I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.
Yep staggering manufacturing dates is a good suggestion. I do it but it does make purchasing during sales periods to get good prices harder. Better than losing multiple drives at once, but RAID needs a backup anyway and nobody should skip that step.
I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you’ve got considerable cash.
Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that’s a good candidate for more white label drives.
I would absolutely not use refurbs personally. As part of the refurb process they wipe the SMART data which means you have zero power-on hours listed, zero errors, rewrite-count, etc - absolutely no idea what their previous life was.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.
Yep staggering manufacturing dates is a good suggestion. I do it but it does make purchasing during sales periods to get good prices harder. Better than losing multiple drives at once, but RAID needs a backup anyway and nobody should skip that step.
I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you’ve got considerable cash.
Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that’s a good candidate for more white label drives.
Thanks! It seems too risky for something like a hard drive.