4TB is a lot of data to lose when the Deathstar (oops, Deskstar) explodes.
These things have had a bad rap for a very long time. Not even sure why Hitachi still markets them.
Every drive manufacturer has had dud drive model lines. So generalizing on a manufacturer based upon years old experience isn’t necessarily fair.
My issue with this “deal” is that they are refurbed and such large capacity. By definition a lot of data will end up on it. This is not a solid state TV.
There is no way you can know what kind of temperature/vibration/drop/whatever kind of abuse it ‘survived’ in its prior life. Just because it tests out ok after a wipe & 10 minute test at the refurb bench does not assure it is a gem.
The only way I’d consider a refurb hard drive is if it were priced less than 50 cents on the dollar. And even then you have to consider whether the risk is worth the savings if you have to replace it.
BTW, @mattimuss, that nickname is hardly original to your university. And it is an old nickname applied to several generations old drives.
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We’ve had some trouble with the 3TB version of these at work. Slightly over a 50% failure rate. On the plus side, all the replacement drives (all refurbished) have been faultless so far. Lastly, they are rather slow drives for the size.
Still, it depends on what you use them for.
“Still” - no. “Again” - yes. (See also “toshiba hard drives”.)
And I’m yet to see a refurbished hard drive last more than a week.
Trouble is the higher the capacity of a hard drive the more prone it is to failing. Couple that with a 60 day warranty and you have a pointless product.
Yep considering they have a 1million MTBF rating when they were NEW. Guess they might make a nice external offload drive for ones DVR (comcast, WOW, etc) so if it fails, you won’t cry too much.
I’ll buy refurbs or factory outlet models of most anything…But hard drives? I don’t think I’d buy a refurb drive.
Or refurb milk.
Referb drives are the way to go; if you’re worried about a drive failure, you’re doing something wrong.
You should be backing up important data (pictures, tax records, etc) to the cloud and any spinning media should be in a RAID that can survive a drive failure. Personally, I do 3 drives in RAID 5 (that would get you 8GB of usable space and the ability to survive 1 drive failure). SSD drives are safer, but can still fail.
As far as referb quality, most of the time the fault was in the circuit board and not the spinning bit. SSDs are safer to buy referbed.
Judging a drive based on brand is a bad way to go. There is practically no statistical correlation between the brand of disk and the reliability. The reliability is variable based on drive series. Every manufacturer has had rock star drives and lemons. Also, every manufacturer has a cheap-ass series of drive that isn’t designed for 24/7 use, and will fail quickly.
Installation environment can also have a huge effect. If you install a large number of drives poorly and the same way, you’re going to experience a large number of failures (poorly generally means high temperatures or vibration).
All that said, I wouldn’t get this drive. If the manufacturer isn’t willing to put at least a 3 year warranty on the drive, they probably know they won’t last.
(I’m not a university IT tech, but I have worked professionally building enterprise storage arrays)
The only drive I don’t have in a RAID config is my boot drive. It gets a weekly snapshot, and I keep the last four snapshots.
My primary system storage is RAID5 on a local controller, I back that array up to a network Drobo. I have a monthly sync up to Amazon S3, and all the family photos and long-term critical records are additionally archived on Amazon Glacier.
I replace hard drives after 4 years. I try to never buy two drives from the same run if they’re going into one of the RAIDs. Yet I’ve twice had a second drive in a RAID5 array fail while in the process of rebuilding the array after a drive failure.
I’ve not lost a byte of data, but that doesn’t mean drive recovery isn’t a PITA that I prefer to avoid.
This isn’t raised floor space; it’s a home office, so with the possible exception of those environmentals, I’m not doin’ anything wrong…
…And I don’t buy refurb drives.
Yep because the failure of the old 75GXPs 13 years ago wasn’t the reason someone would refer to a Deskstar drive as Deathstars.
RAID-5 is generally regarded as obsolete, because hard drive uncorrectable read frequency has not risen with drive capacity. In other words, the probability of a second drive failing while you’re in the middle of replacing your one and only redundant drive in a RAID-5 setup is now simply too high.
The recommendation these days is to go to RAID-6 (two redundant drives).
Refurb (probably for a good reason)
5400 RPM
60 Day Warranty!
I think you would be safer with a refurbed condom.
Wow… so easy to pass.
Note: this is a 5400 RPM and not the slightly more expensive but much F A SSSSTER 7200 RPM model…
Ahhhh yes, I remember it like it was only the year 2000…oh wait, it was. I had just purchased a 60GXP for my new uber dream rig, and when I started hearing about all the failures from the 60/75gxp line I got worried and bought a WD to replace it. The WD lasted 3-4 years and started throwing random read/write errors. The 60GXP was relegated to non-critical duty hosting a secondary copy of my music collection on a streaming box until 2011-12 sometime. I think it actually ended up out lasting any other drive I’ve ever owned.
Moral of the story - every hard drive manufacturer makes good, bad, and crappy drives. always backup!
(I still wouldn’t buy a refurb drive, for the reasons bluemaple mentioned above).
I’ve purchased refurb drives before for 25% to 50% off the price for new. I have 2, maybe 3 still running.
But I would only buy if they had a warranty comparable to the new drive.
(And I’ve never needed the warranty, unlike with new drives…)
YES! Seriously that IT guy was probably referring to dinoosaur drives.
But I bought a Deskstar 5K2000 drive, and after a while it developed 1 bad sector. The drive wouldn’t do anything. Very slow. I ran chkdsk to try to get the drive’s firmware to map the bad sector out, but it wouldn’t.
Hitachi’s utility wouldn’t do a write-based surface scan, which is what’s needed in order for the drive to remap. Chkdsk also does a read-based surface scan and so does WD’s WD Diag for Windows.
So I ran ‘HDD Regenerator’ and walla it found and corrected the sector.
It’s hard to imagine the drive can’t realize the trouble the sector is causing and map it out automatically in this day in age.