I am looking to replace some hard drives and I am looking for some suggestions…Will I get some useful years out of any of the 2tb+ drives listed on ebay (ones manufactured mostly for 2012) ? What are the best manufactures from around that time period?
How are the new Seagate Exos series…looked like from backblaze that earlier Seagates had really high failure rates ???
The only drives that have legitimate reason to avoid, even if looking at Backblaze data, are 3TB drives (all brands but yes particularly Seagate) - after the 2011 Thailand flooding it seems that the platters used in 3TB drives in particular suffered high failure rates. IIRC 3TB drives all use 4x 768GB platters, and are the only size to use 768GB platters. Platters are made by two or three companies in about a half dozen factories mostly in Thailand, separate from the “hard drive” manufacturers, and all the “hard drive” manufacturers buy from those.
I’ll also mention to not bother with 5TB and 6TB drives, not because of any particular failure rates, but because they didn’t sell as well and so the used stock is smaller.
I currently have been buying drives from bitdeals.tech - they are accumulating large batches from datacenter closures and focusing mostly on drives, as opposed to other recycling/resale companies that buy whole servers and part them out and have a lot more overhead.
At this point, the good price on used enterprise drives is for 4TB. Even if 2TB fulfills your size needs, it isn’t worth it, both because of age and because $/TB isn’t low enough (they aren’t cheaper than a 4TB that I’ve seen)
thanks for the insite and suggestion.
So I would be ok with the seagate 4tb drives?
As far as I’m aware, yes. I even have some that I bought new years ago that are just as fine as all the other drives. If whole brands had repeat issues, they wouldn’t be able to keep operating. But individual drives or batches will have issues.