I just came across your old vid when you bought the drive, then saw this. Thanks for the update. I'm also gonna look for these enterprise drives for data I don't really care about losing.

I bought 8 refurbished 12tb exos drives about a year ago, 3 of them started going bad about 3-6 months after purchase. The vendor had them replaced within a week. If this were something critical I'd have gone for new drives with full warranty but considering I got the drives for half the cost of new drives (at the time) and my critical data is backed up I figured I'd see if it were worth the cost savings. I know worth means different things to different people but to me at the price point even with the annoyance of having to RMA some of the drives it was worth the cost savings and when I build myself a new NAS at some point this year I'll probably grab more drives from that vendor.

One more tidbit. I had a 12 TB ironwolf pro that went from 0 to 654 bad sectors in a week. I have 2-drive failure protection on my NAS so I decided to leave it in place and see what happened. Two months later it was still at 654 bad sectors, failing SMART, but still working. I replaced it anyway out of caution, as you did.

I have four 12TB ironwolf pro drives, 5 yrs old (44,000 hours runtime). I also have four 6 TB drives, 8 years old (68,000 hours). All with zero bad sectors. That’s a problem because a reseller can take those drives, reset the Smart EEPROM data to 0 hours, and sell them as refurbished. Backblaze failure data shows six year old drives with a failure rate around 5%, 8yr @ >7%. That’s why I never buy used drives.

i find it absurd that TrueNAS doesn't have a SMART interface other than pass/fail.

I've had a couple 4TB HGST MegaScales that I got from eBay running for the better part of two years. Still working just fine. Had a couple of errors, but from me messing with stuff and accidentally bumping the cheap PCIe SATA card I was using until recently. No bad sectors, and drives are completely full in a raid 1 config for my media server. Just added four 8TB UltraStars that I also picked up from eBay to increase my storage capacity via two additional raid 1 volumes and mergerfs.

You have to be sensible when picking up used Enterprise drives like this. They've typically been online in an enterprise storage appliance since new, which will have had the highest capacity drives of the time. Looks like you bought used 6TB drives in 2023.. yeah they're going to have insane hours. 10/12TB would have been a better choice. I picked up the same style (Ultrastar DC HC520) 8TB in 2022 with ~30k hours. Been on ever since, no issues.

Thank you

I think its a given that used drives are a risk. Any used hardware is always a risk. I bought a server for a reseller and went to his warehouse to pick it up - asked him to switch it on and he went gangster mode on me.... insulting his honour and all that crap - but it didn't start - blue screens everywhere. Got it working and half price. But used parts are - by default - being gotten rid of for a reason. If you're dumb enough to buy a 16TB drive from Ali for £9.99 you deserve the pain. But picking a used high capacity drive that you hope wil serve you? Yep thats fine. just don't throw a brick if it fails - you bought a reject, remember that.

If no one gonna say, faulty *CPU* and faulty *RAM* can produce errors on HDDs And of course faulty HDD enclosure/ cables for portable ones.

Reallocated sectors aren’t bad in and of themselves. But if they continue to increase like yours are id recommend a replacement.

Could you list the software used for monitoring/testing? Thanks

nice! thanks bud

Im using the same 6tb drives and had one fail too.

Many people put these drives in some raid configuration for 'media'and such..but I'm curious which media that is. Is that games, movies and such?

Check the Backblaze Drive Stats. Then you know why they selling this drives 😅

What seller did you purchase the HGST from?

You shouldn't touch the metallic parts of the RAM Modules, 'coz static. You should have cloned the bad HDD if it was possible

Good luck with that counterfeit RAM. ;)

/cares

74K hours? That's nearly 8 1/2 years of solid powered on time. I would be very happy for a drive to last that long. Of course, if you've only owned the drive for 6 months, it means that the second hand drive you bought had already been powered for 8 years and was super likely to fail at any point. Knowing that you only had 1/16th of the life of the drive, paying any more than 1/16th the price of a new drive is poor economy.

Personally, having plenty of drive ports, I prefer to fit the replacement drive then 'replace'. I just prefer to have a functioning pool rather than a degraded one to copy the data to the new drive, just in case of a drive failure during the process.