In an effort to cut costs (broke and in college here), I won an auction for three 2TB Seagate ST2000DM001 drives. I was only interested because it seemed decent to get a few 2TB drives for $25-30 each, but my dumb ass didn't realize how old they were.
The seller said that they tested them with this: hdsentinel.com, and everything passed 100%. I'm still concerned though because these drives are old as hell, so won't they be prone to failure sooner?
I guess I should just pony up the money for a refurbished 3TB with a warranty :/
Buying used drives is just fine. He needs to make backups in case one of them fails, yes, but he'd have to do that with brand new drives, too, since any drive, of any brand or any model, used or new, can fail at any time with no warning.
Eli Hill
The smartest thing OP can do is back them up on each other, or use a magnet to make them last longer
David Rogers
I was thinking about using the magnet trick to be honest
Lincoln Wilson
>check for smart errors using smartctl (linux) or crystaldiskinfo (windows) >look at the power on hours too to get an idea of how heavily they've been used >get two 3.5" HDD enclosures >put one disk in your machine (preferably the least used one), use the remaining two as backups (put them in the enclosures and only connect them when you do backups so they aren't running all the time)
Blake Morales
RAID 5
Luke Williams
If I'm understanding this properly,
I can take the three 2TB drives, throw them in RAID 5, and then have 4TB total with a fault tolerance of one drive?
Luis Torres
Just do raid 0 for Superior performance and getting the full 6TB
Hudson Powell
Performance isn't my concern, and RAID 0 is not ideal because I'd lose my data if a drive fails. I don't have any drives to backup that 6TB. RAID 5 seems like a possibility though.
