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OP said it was "the only one available". Everybody ignores that point.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I still wouldn't buy the refurbished disk. It's not as if new disks are not being made, so in the worst case he can buy new from another seller.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Gerry Schmitz wrote: OP said it was "the only one available". Everybody ignores that point.
You don't build a system you want to be able to rely on using questionable parts. No reliable parts? Wait until they become available, or go elsewhere.
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There's a reason it was the only one available - no one else wanted to trust their data to a used disk.
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HDDs are assembled in a clean room
No way anyone is going to open a factory-sealed drive. Whatever 'renewed' means, it doesn't mean that.
What matters here is how many hours of operation the drive has experienced - they don't last forever. I think SMART might tell you that, but only after you've bought it, of course. As for why it was returned, well people return stuff for all sorts of reasons. If it's Amazon, they have a very liberal returns policy.
But also, what Griff said.
Paul Sanders.
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal.
Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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The big risks with "renewed"/"refurbished" drives are that you don't know how long they were operating, under what conditions, or what kind of refurbishment work was performed on them. I don't think the risk is worth it.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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If you aren't using raid then you are prepared to lose some files if a disk fails, so, as long as the warranty is good, a "renewed" drive shouldn't make any difference. However, as has been mentioned, $10 off seems a very small reduction; I'd expect this disk to be open-box, 1 or 2 power cycles and power on hours in single figures and even then I'd haggle.
If you were using raid, then using a "renewed" disk shouldn't be a problem, but again $10 seems a pretty low reduction.
Not using raid and expecting that a new disk would be less likely to fail than a "renewed" one is just being optimistic.
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Sadly, my old NAS fried a disk port, and that fried a disk, or a disk fried itself and that fried the disk port - but since Seagate made all the disks and the NAS itself, it's a moot point which did which.
Certainly the disk from port 2 is dead, and if I plug anything into port 2 the whole NAS locks up solid. And somehow, that destroyed the whole volume at the same time so all my info is toast. Never mind, I have the important stuff on offline archives, but I've lost all the JPG, MP3, and MP4 I loaded on from phones, CD's and DVDs over the years.
So, I've replaced the disk with an identical one to keep them the same, and bought a new NAS - QNAP TS453 this time. It's currently building the RAID volume which'll be a while longer as 16TB of disks is a time consuming process even at 6Gb/sec.
But test writes even while it's doing that show it's about 4 times faster write speed than the Seagate, and that should improve once the volume is complete.
And it supports SMB3 so Windows likes it!
But it can do other things: LDX and Docker containers ... including SQL Server as supplied in Developer Edition 2019 by Microsoft. 
That could be well worth putting on ... anyone got experience loading a docker SQL/Linux combo? (I know, I know - linux is the devil's OS but I don't have to touch it once it's running and it'll export it from my dev PC).
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I have a 9 year old Synology NAS with 4TB of mirrored drives. In the last couple years, I've moved most stuff to the cloud and archived the remainder to external USB drives. When the NAS dies - I'll unplug it and forget it. Life is too short to manage home networks. 
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fgs1963 wrote: Life is too short to manage home networks upload to / download from so-called cloud services
FTFY.
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Yep. 8Mb/s upload vs 100+MB/s write speed? Not a contest.
Even with the Seagate, I got 35MB/s writes.
[edit]
"200+MB/s write speed" changed to "100+MB/s write speed" - finger trouble. Should have spotted it, given my LAN is "only" 1Gb/s ... which will clearly put an upper cap on transfer rates. 
[/edit]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
modified 11-Aug-22 1:19am.
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To each their own. I analyzed my usage and decided the cloud was a better choice.
Just curious… what kind of big data files are you transferring so frequently that makes local network storage so important.
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The bulk of the big stuff is movies - I ripped all my DVD's to MP4 so they were all available without a change of physical disks. Since each one averages out at around 3GB, that's a significant amount of data to try and squeeze through an 8Mb/s upload!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Do you use a media server like Plex or Kodi? Or something more basic like DLNA?
I didn’t move movie files to the cloud (just too damn big and I don’t want to pay for that much storage). I currently use Plex on my NAS but find that I almost never use it anymore. End up streaming from Netflix, Prime, Apple TV+, etc… As a test (for when the NAS dies eventually), I copied the movies to an external USB drive and can plug it into the TV directly and use the TVs menus to access. Works fine.
No doubt, a media server NAS is slightly more convenient - I just decided the ~$1000 cost wasn’t worth it for my use.
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Hmmm,
Life is too short to wait most of the day for the 1Gb of video you want to watch to transfer from the cloud to your PC at approx 2Mb per sec (providing the connection even stays up for that long).
Don't forget that only a small proportion of the world (and not much more of the 'prosperous' west) has fast, reliable cloud connections.
I am not hopeful that, having been offered fast fibre internet, it will actually be provided by the 10th anniversary of that first offer... (9 years, 7 months and counting!)
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OriginalGriff wrote: Seagate made all the disks and the NAS itself
The cynic in me wants to say "well there's your problem right there".
Maybe it's just my bad luck, but all the Seagate drives I've ever owned are dead. I tend to only buy WD, and of all WD drives that are no longer in service, it's because their low capacity doesn't make them worth using anymore, not because they died. They got retired still going strong.
I was even given an old system from work a good while back. 4 Seagate drives...2 were dead, and another one couldn't even complete a format request. My bias is entirely based on my own experience. YMMV.
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My experience matches yours. Seagate drives fail when they're 18 months old or the data on them becomes critical to your job, whichever comes first. We have a couple RAID arrays originally built using Seagate drives but are now populated with Western Digital.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Honestly I want to give the company a fair chance, how is it possible to get such a bad track record and still be in business?
Yet, my own experience speaks for itself, and it's not like I somehow treat the drives from one manufacturer any differently than another's. But I just can't bring myself to trust them with any valuable data. They blew too many chances.
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It's my understanding that most drive failures are not due to platter defects or head crashes, but failure of the drive electronics due to any number of factors: temperature, vibration from the drive motor or head positioning, and so on. Many of these sorts of failures only occur after the offending phenomenon has gone on for sufficient time. The implication of course is that some manufacturers are smarter testing for (and designing around) these problems than others.
Software Zen: delete this;
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What RAID configuration were you using?
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RAID 5. I suspect a major glitch overwrote whatever the box was using for volume management and trashed it across the all four disks.
RAID 5 has been good to me up to now - I've had HDD's go down on me before and 24 hours later I'm back with a replacement bought, hot-swapped, and rebuilt without any data loss or even access interruption.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I have a Raid5 with SSD's instead of Hard Disks. Is there a reason to use Hard disks instead of SSD?
Ed
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Cost?
The speed is not that much of a factor, given that the write speed to the NAS with 6Gb/s HDD's is limited by the 1Gb network in my case anyway.
Reliability may be an issue as well, if your NAS data gets updated regularly - as a "static file" server, SSD is great but they wear out on writes, so you pays your money and you takes your chances.
SSD Lifespan: How Long do SSDs Really Last?[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Great Article,
I remember when SSDs first came out, this was my major concern.
So, I threw one in my TiVo, it lasted ALMOST 5 years! And realizing that TiVo Continuously writes, 24x7.
About 2yrs into that experience, I was "sold" on SSDs, and especially with wear levelling.
I tend to to UPGRADE/REPLACE my SSDs at 2-3yr intervals. The challenge for me right now is HEAT.
The 4TB mVe can get QUITE WARM. When it is time to replace with an 8TB, I am not sure I would trust it inside my Laptop!
I used to replace/upgrade my HDDs every 2-3yrs as well. Clone them for backups. Then additional backups.
So I could plop in my cloned drives, and do restores on the remaining stuff...
The final step for me is to buy a LIKE KIND off-lease model of my laptop with full memory.
And maintain it as a cold spare. What's NICE about that, is that BEFORE I restore to my spare drives, I can
Actually install them in the COLD SPARE. Disable all networking, and BOOT it up. (Twice I have had to turn to a cold spare, and BOTH times I CHUCKLED over the CHEAP COST of a second computer, versus lost time!)
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OriginalGriff wrote: the write speed to the NAS with 6Gb/s HDD's is limited by the 1Gb network in my case anyway.
This is only correct as long as you are writing small amounts, so the disk's cache has a chance to do its job.
When writing amounts that don't fit in the disk's cache (> 256 MB), you are limited to the disk's native speed. As long as the data fit into a single, empty, cylinder, you might (on a large, fast, disk) be able to max out the disk interface at 6 Gb/s. If the R/W head must move to a different cylinder (or you must skip used blocks in a cache block, so a read/modify/write cycle may be needed), the write speed drops drastically.
A similar argument applies to read operations.
I have neglected the O/S overhead, file-system overhead, RAID overhead, etc., which would slow things further.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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