Bought about 225 of these 2TB SAS drives off a surpluser for C$2 apiece. Now I have to remove the trays and test them all.

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:22:

Bought about 225 of these 2TB SAS drives off a surpluser for C$2 apiece. Now I have to remove the trays and test them all.

FjoLMqyWIAIhSek.jpgFjmpy9HX0AArrS6.jpg

Very nice. Hopefully they still have some decent life left in them. Any fun plans for them?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:33:

Very nice. Hopefully they still have some decent life left in them. Any fun plans for them?

They seem to have a lot of hours but few spinups so are probably mostly good forever till the bearings go, IME drives that don't fail in the first year or so will just go till they don't with an extended bathtub curve. I've been selling some privately to people building cheap NAS arrays, and I'm planning to just use them to fill up old X58/X79/C602 workstations and servers I get that have no drives.

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:58:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:33:

Very nice. Hopefully they still have some decent life left in them. Any fun plans for them?

They seem to have a lot of hours but few spinups so are probably mostly good forever till the bearings go, IME drives that don't fail in the first year or so will just go till they don't with an extended bathtub curve. I've been selling some privately to people building cheap NAS arrays, and I'm planning to just use them to fill up old X58/X79/C602 workstations and servers I get that have no drives.

Sweet 😀

Bought a Asrock 990FX Extreme3 (AM3+) motherboard.
Sold as dead no POST, turned out to be perfectly fine but a little picky on RAM.

10€ 😀

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:58:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:33:

Very nice. Hopefully they still have some decent life left in them. Any fun plans for them?

They seem to have a lot of hours but few spinups so are probably mostly good forever till the bearings go, IME drives that don't fail in the first year or so will just go till they don't with an extended bathtub curve. I've been selling some privately to people building cheap NAS arrays, and I'm planning to just use them to fill up old X58/X79/C602 workstations and servers I get that have no drives.

I love the server sata6 2012 Hitachi 2tb drives I got off ebay for $15 a piece in 2016? Loud, hardly any power ons but lots of hours but still checkout perfectly today. Every time I find a good Hitachi sata drive I feel like Iv struck gold!

ODwilly wrote on 2022-12-23, 23:02:

I love the server sata6 2012 Hitachi 2tb drives I got off ebay for $15 a piece in 2016? Loud, hardly any power ons but lots of hours but still checkout perfectly today. Every time I find a good Hitachi sata drive I feel like Iv struck gold!

I ended up with about 140 seagates and the rest are a mix of HGST and hitachi. Been selling them for $8 and they move okay. Who can argue with 32TB of disks for $160?

libby wrote on 2022-12-24, 00:18:

ODwilly wrote on 2022-12-23, 23:02:

I love the server sata6 2012 Hitachi 2tb drives I got off ebay for $15 a piece in 2016? Loud, hardly any power ons but lots of hours but still checkout perfectly today. Every time I find a good Hitachi sata drive I feel like Iv struck gold!

I ended up with about 140 seagates and the rest are a mix of HGST and hitachi. Been selling them for $8 and they move okay. Who can argue with 32TB of disks for $160?

Holy cow... you're selling 2TB drives for $8?? 🤣

On that note, I have some 4TB HGST drives I picked up "refurbished" on Amazon a year or two ago and I've been happy with them. Fast for hard drives and so far no problems with them. They were quite cheap too... though not quite to the $4 per TB level that you're talking about. 😁

... all that said, I have been completely spoiled by cheap solid state storage lately though. I switched to all solid state in my main PC this year because it was so affordable and I could then use the old hard drive as a backup drive. There's nothing like never having to wait for a drive to spin up, even if it's my data drive. It makes imaging the drives to a hard drive feel very slow though. Once everything is running at NVMe speed, even external drives, then backups will get done much more frequently. 😮

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-24, 01:06:

Holy cow... you're selling 2TB drives for $8?? 🤣

Well, they are from 2012-2014 and they're SAS6 connector, they won't work on a regular SATA connector. Irritating because I got an old Drobo 8-bay NAS an office was tossing out, unfortunately its backplane is SATA and has the little plastic bit dividing power and data so these don't work in it.

If they were SATA connector I imagine I'd have probably had them all sold inside 15 minutes. 😀

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:58:

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:33:

Very nice. Hopefully they still have some decent life left in them. Any fun plans for them?

They seem to have a lot of hours but few spinups so are probably mostly good forever till the bearings go, IME drives that don't fail in the first year or so will just go till they don't with an extended bathtub curve. I've been selling some privately to people building cheap NAS arrays, and I'm planning to just use them to fill up old X58/X79/C602 workstations and servers I get that have no drives.

That sounds like a great plan to me. I'm assuming these were probably used in a data center so odds are they were well cared for and cooled properly.

I guess this would still be considered modern. I just picked up an i7-4790k to max out my main system. It was a completely unnecessary buy (I already had an i7-4770), but the price was right and I wanted to max my system out with the fastest supported processor. A ran through a suite of cpu benchmarks and saw a 10-12% increase. Peak system power measured at the outlet stayed pretty close to the 4770, increasing from 118W to 133W (tested during Cinebench R23).

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:22:

Bought about 225 of these 2TB SAS drives off a surpluser for C$2 apiece. Now I have to remove the trays and test them all.

FjoLMqyWIAIhSek.jpgFjmpy9HX0AArrS6.jpg

Once I bought two used 2TB hard drives both were found worn out, Hitachi 2TB HUA722020ALA330 was reseeking, disassembly analysis revealed fluid bearing worn out, and other Seagate 2TB ST2000NM0011 developed defects. This was about 5 years ago. About 10-20 hours on my machines.

Buy used with risk in mind especially enterprise drives. They beat them down ruthlessly.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-12-26, 02:23:

Once I bought two used 2TB hard drives both were found worn out, Hitachi 2TB HUA722020ALA330 was reseeking, disassembly analysis revealed fluid bearing worn out, and other Seagate 2TB ST2000NM0011 developed defects. This was about 5 years ago. About 10-20 hours on my machines.

Buy used with risk in mind especially enterprise drives. They beat them down ruthlessly.

Cheers,

I found the caveat with them, they're all low level formatted 520 byte sectors so I have to sg_format them as 512 byte at 8 hours per drive.

Annoying, but still worth it.

I bought a similar pile of 73GB hitachi SCSI drives about 20 years ago which had the same issue, at the time there was no way to do this. Now there is, thankfully.

A couple of AM2+ AM3 mobos.

One of these cheap USB-HDMI capture dongles, I'm not expecting anything stellar, but for the purpose I bought it in the first place (capturing the output of a RPi1B+), I don't really need anything fancy like one of these StarTech capture boxes.

Considering the price I paid for it, I was expecting it to have a molded plastic enclosure, but much to my surprise, it has a nice aluminum shell that feels a bit heavy.

Received socket 2011 broadwell 16 core 40MB processor. 2 more things to get is HP Z440 and four sticks of 16GB DDR4 2400 or 2666 registered ECC modules by Micron. I do this one a month at a time.

Cheers,

Grabbed a pile of parts and things at a recycler.

- 28 x i5 3470
- 2 x xeon E5440
- xeon X3323
- P4 3GHz/1MB/800 S478
- i5 2390T
- Core 2 Duo P9600
- Phenom II P960
- Athlon 64 X2 TK-53 and TK-57
- 8 x 4GB + 5 x 8GB DDR3 SODIMM
- 5 x 4GB + 1 x 8GB DDR3 DIMM

Also six of these kooky point of sale PCs, which I think were used at Subway restaurants at some point, and an LG Flattron 17" CRT monitor.

Also about 30 pounds of random PCIe and AGP video cards, varying from Geforce 6800 GT OC AGP to 8800 GTX Ultra, 7950 GT OC, HIS Radeon HD 4870, etc.

Can't argue paying $100 canadian for all this.

Wow that's a great deal for 100 bucks. Nice find.

Got 2x16GB DDR4 to make my potato PC a little bit less potato, replacing the 1x8GB DDR4 module that was inside it and which looked like the cheapest memory module I've seen in years (it only has 4 tiny memory chips on one side of the DIMM, all 4 being on one side of the notch in the middle of the DIMM as well).
It's way faster rated than it needs to be, but this way I can move these modules to a different system in the future, if I want to do so.

libby wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:22:

Bought about 225 of these 2TB SAS drives off a surpluser for C$2 apiece. Now I have to remove the trays and test them all.

FjoLMqyWIAIhSek.jpgFjmpy9HX0AArrS6.jpg

Lifelong supply ftw! ^^ 😜