I’m currently a student so I don’t have thousands to spend on hard drives and I’d really love to make a compact storage server with large capacity to do stuff like a Plex server. I’ve been looking and I see good deals on sites like eBay, however they seem too cheap sometimes. What are things I should look out for/should I just not get used hard drives?

I need to mention this would not be for critical data such as personal photos etc. it would just be raw data storage that I could afford to lose- it would just be a pain.

  • Godort@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    They’re always a gamble.

    Sometimes you have another decade of life in them and sometimes they fail within a month. I wouldn’t bother unless I was getting an insanely good deal (like over 50% off retail) as I’m likely to replace it within the year.

    I also wouldn’t trust them outside of a mirrored or pairity RAID just in case the data on that disk proves to be important

  • c_rbonBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve only bought one so far, but i’m a fan of manufacturer re-certified drives from serverpartdeals. Prices seem to go up and down however, as the 18TB i bought for $180 is now $270 (seagate exos 2x18)