- We've told you this so many times,
buying used hard drives is not worth risking your data.
But sometimes, you see an offer you just cannot refuse.
We took that risk
and bought eight used hard drives from eBay,
totaling 136 terabytes for $2,000.
That's almost half the price compared to new,
really impressive savings.
But, just like buying a used GPU on eBay,
there's a real chance that new to you
high capacity hard drives were used for cryptomining.
So is even this great deal worth it,
if there's a chance your parts arrive
with one foot already in the grave?
I'll tell you where
and why these drives are popping up for sale,
what red flags to look out for,
and when you should consider making an exception
to the don't buy used hard drives rule,
right after I tell you
how to make an exceptional segue to our sponsor.
- Ridge.
Ridge Wallet has redefined the traditional wallet
with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates.
The bulge in your pants
shouldn't be from your wallet dang it.
Use offer code Linus to save 10%
and get free worldwide shipping.
(logo twinkling)
(upbeat music)
- The shameful truth is,
this isn't even the first time we've bought used storage,
my personal hard drives are from a dead NAS
and are currently dying.
Years ago, Linus splurged
on 24 used SSDs for a server at home,
but the only reason he was comfortable taking that risk
was that he had been reassured by another buyer
the SSDs were in good health, so he bought them.
This time though we don't have that luxury,
but what we do have are some very attractive prices.
$200 for 16 terabytes
when the cheapest new drive of the same capacity
would be in the neighborhood of $300.
So why are they so cheap?
Uh, supply and demand, wow.
A huge volume of drives are being dumped
on eBay, Marketplace, and the like.
Some from everyday people, some that were refurbished,
and some from unscrupulous users
that used the hard drive to mine cryptocurrencies.
Ugh.
But how much does that hurt them?
Well, there are many coins
you can mine on a hard drive today,
we've tried it in the past,
the most popular by far is Chia mining.
It was so popular at launch in May, 2021,
that Seagate was even considering making an entire line
of cryptocurrency specific hard drives.
Sure, anyway.
Chia mined hard drives should be pretty safe to buy
since Chia runs on a proof of space algorithm.
So once the drives are filled with the plot data from Chia
to prove the space or capacity,
very little read or write activity is required
while mining that space on the drive.
That means that drives used in Chia mining are barely used,
which is enough justification
for us to roll the dice on eBay.
We settled on two 16 terabyte WD Ultrastar HC550,
two 16 terabyte Seagate Exos, 16 Xs, that one?
Yeah, this one right here,
and four 18 terabyte Toshibas, oh (beep) me.
And now they're here,
let's compare what was advertised with what we actually got.
Our two WDs were listed with up to 2100 hours of power on.
Yeah, not so much.
We got drives with 2300 and 2600 hours,
a bit above the stated value,
but in the grand scheme of things,
those extra 10 or 20 days of power on time
aren't really a big deal.
On the flip side, the Seagates were expected to arrive
with up to 11,000 power on hours,
and instead they just had, like, 234, 213 hours.
Damn, score.
But still, is that a lot or a little?
In the enterprise world,
the expected lifetime is around 45,000 hours,
but, anecdotally,
some of our staff have drives with 50 to 60,000 hours.
Ultimately, it's hard to say when a drive is too old to use.
Higher hour drives are typically cheaper
but they also might not last as long.
Only you can decide if it's worth it for your needs,
but we'd recommend 20, maybe 25,000 hours as a safe ceiling.
Lastly, our four Toshiba drives,
the packaging just speaks for itself.
This is what our other drives came in,
you can see here ESD bags,
this foam to hold your hard drives in,
and this is how the Toshibas arrived.
Not great for mechanical devices with moving parts,
like, just look at the SATA connectors on this one.
I noticed that the corner
is just completely bashed in on this one.
Oh, it's just actually broken (laughs).
Fantastic.
A quick sound check on the Toshibas
tells us the other drives were damaged as well.
(hard drive squeaking)
Huge bummer.
Unfortunately, this buyer didn't accept our returns,
but no matter, the buyer protection on eBay is excellent
and we were able to use the money back guarantee
to get our cash back.
But physical condition and power on hours
aren't the only way to diagnose our drives,
it's time to pull the rest of the smart data.
Thanks to the cloud backup and storage systems experts
at Backblaze, we know that some parameters
are better indicator of failures than others.
The combination of attributes 5, 187, 188, 197, and 198
can accurately predict an impending drive failure
76.7% of the time.
And how did our other drives fair?
Flying colors.
It's golf rules and we have zeros across the board,
or at least as far as we could tell.
See, every drive manufacturer has different ideas
about which of the many specific smart attributes
they should monitor.
Seagate gave us all five,
while neither WD or Toshiba include 187 and 188.
One blemish though,
was that despite its low power cycle and on hours count,
attribute 199 on one of our Seagate Exos drives
was flagged as concerning.
This rather nebulous error count increases
when there are infant decimally short drops
in communication between the controller on the hard drive
and the SATA controller on the motherboard
during a data transfer operation.
These drops are almost exclusively caused
by things like a bad or loose SATA connection,
or a faulty SATA controller on the host system.
So, ultimately they're safe to ignore
so long as they aren't reoccurring
and if you confirm the cabling and the controller
are both good.
The final thing we can glean from our smart data
is the evidence of cryptomining, farming,
well, whatever.
We're looking at three specific signs,
high power on hours,
a relatively low number of total reads
compared to those power on hours,
and a total write amount
that is roughly equal to the size of the drive,
although that's no guarantee.
With a quick conversion and a little math,
we can see our Seagate drives have a total reads and writes
that are staggeringly high
given their 250-ish power on hours.
It's also roughly twice their capacity,
which, according to our friend Wendell from Level1 Techs,
could be due to one of the integrity checks
that might run while refurbishing a drive.
And lo and behold,
they've been etched to say they're re-certified.
Weird, since there was nothing about that in the listing.
Well, well, we can only speculate on their history,
but it's possible these are gray market drives,
from a batch of drives
that had their tilt indicators tripped during shipping
or were sent back as an open box return.
Drive failure is mostly common when a drive is new,
they maybe DOA, or fail, within a couple days of use.
So these drives could have been through all of that
before being re-certified and then sold to us.
Checking the Seagate website for warranties
has both drives report back not warrantied by Seagate,
which in theory means that the re-certifying company
offers an alternative warranty,
and this 30 day seller warranty is exactly that.
30 days isn't quite the five years
that Seagate offers from authorized sellers,
but it's a heck of a lot more than zero days.
Lastly, our WD drives continued their trend
of ignoring useful features
and chose not to log total reads and writes.
Thanks WD.
This makes it difficult for us
to even speculate on their history,
but at only 100 or so days of power on time,
it seems unlikely they were part of a farm
because having the patience
to allow those rewards to slowly accumulate
is essential for returning a profit,
especially when factoring in upfront costs
and power consumption.
And you should factor in the power you feel
with a screwdriver from lttstore.com (chuckles).
They're actually very good.
Now it's time to do something with these drives.
Seeing as we have this much storage on hand,
let's do it to make just a janky DIY NAS,
and compare its price to an off the shelf pre-built NAS.
The keen eyed among you may have already noticed though
that we paid more for our 16 terabyte drives than our 18s.
So it seems like a good time to note
that we had some time constraints
that prevented us from getting
the absolute best bang for a buck on the hard drive.
Namely, we wanted to get a variety of different drives
from different sellers,
and they had to be able to ship it to us up in Canada,
further limiting our choices.
Our best deal was easily the recertified Seagate drives
that came with an 80 gigabyte per dollar
compared to 50 to 55 gigabytes per dollar brand new.
That's two used drives
for the price of one and a half brand new.
And if you happen to need a drive,
we'll have the links for both new and used
down in the description.
Oh, here we go.
Oh wow, that's heavy.
Good old steel chassis.
Assuming we converted our trusty old $69 gaming PC
into a NAS,
and assuming we loaded it with these 16 terabyte Seagates,
which, ideally, would've been the Toshibas, if they worked.
And then you factor in some money for cables
and a hard drive cage,
we are sitting right around 71 gigabytes per dollar.
Meanwhile, a preconfigured NAS with that much storage space
comes in at $1,622, meaning 39.5 gigabytes per dollar.
What could you do with that extra $720?
How about buying another three full hard drives,
or building a whole other PC?
Not to mention that the $69 PC
can still do all the normal things you expect a PC to do,
while a dedicated NAS has a singular purpose.
But it's not just about spending less on your NAS project,
you can also afford to buy more drives
that you can dedicate to parity,
for example, choosing to go with RAID 5 instead of RAID 1.
Those used drives may be less reliable overall,
but at some point,
the extra redundancy makes it the safer move.
But there's a few things we haven't touched on so far
with this price discussion.
Sales on new hard drives and shucking.
Shucking hard drives involves buying a drive,
generally intended to be used externally,
and removing all of the unnecessary bits
to just get to the 3.5 inch hard drive inside.
As an example, you could pick up
one of these 18 terabyte external WD My Books brand new
for 280 per drive, meaning 64 gigabytes per dollar,
substantially closer to the cost of a used drive
than to the cost of one
that was intended to be used internal all along.
As for sales on new drives,
this is essentially a matter of patience.
We've seen the price of a brand new 18 terabyte drive
fall as low as $300.
And new 16 terabyte drives have gone on sale for 245.
Again, not as cheap as used, but it's got a lot of benefits,
like a full warranty, known history,
and zero power on hours.
With all that said though,
can I ultimately recommend using used hard drives?
It's all going to come down
to just your personal comfort level with risk.
If you are storing something easily replaceable,
like Steam games or media files,
you might be pretty excited
to get a bunch of capacity or redundancy
for the same amount of money.
But if you're storing family photos or important documents,
well, those are worth a heck of a lot more than a game save,
to most people, and also just use Steam Cloud saves.
And knowing they're on a new drive
might help you feel more at ease.
Regardless of what drives you end up with,
you should have a good 1, 2, 3 backup strategy in place.
Three copies of your data on two separate mediums,
one stored off-site.
I personally prefer the 1, 1, 1.
- [Harrison] (laughs) Just one drive?
- One drive, already failing, one location.
- [Harrison] (laughs). - (laughs)
These questions about risk
aren't something we can answer for you,
it's up to each individual to decide on their own,
but for our part, yeah, it's kind of worth the risk.
We've definitely had a bunch of change of opinion
on used drives, and we'll be considering them in future
when a build calls for the most terabytes for our dollars.
Just like how this video
calls for the most segue to our sponsor.
- Vessi.
Vessi footwear.
They're known for being lightweight, easy to pack,
and most importantly worn by me,
just joking, most importantly, they're water resistant
thanks to Dyma-tex technology.
Their Everyday Move line is designed
with added support at the midsole and better breathability
to keep up with your active lifestyle.
Take 'em off and put 'em back on with ease, as you saw,
I don't mess with laces anymore,
and these are made creature free,
so every step you take will be guilt free,
they're vegan.
And thanks to the dual climate knit material
your feet will stay dry during the winter
and cool during the summer.
So treat your feet with Vessi's Everyday Move shoes
and save 25 bucks with our offer code Linus Tech Tips
at vessi.com/LinusTechTips.
- So huge thanks for watching this video,
might have been a little bit deeper
than we thought at first, but if you enjoyed this video,
maybe you want to look at the last time we built a tiny NAS
with a 100 terabytes of space.
Sure wish that we bought some used drives for that one.
Have a great day.