[Mercury]

Good evening everybody. My plex server has reached capacity on my 6TB Western Digital Red. I'm looking to expand (at least double my usable space) and move everything into a raid array, so I need two of whatever it is I decide to purchase. I've read some horror stories about refurb drives and to me it just sounds like a bad idea in general. With the overall cost of what I'm trying to do easily being in the hundreds, I'm wondering if anyone has any advice on cost savings here in terms of the best place to source drives or can (unlikely) convince me otherwise on entertaining refurb. drives.

Any info helps and thank you for your time.

Also - 100th thread...yay!

[Buckeyes]

imo and experience buy new. storage is so important...

[F4tDoinkz]

I would avoid refurbed drives. You never know what was on there and still is hidden. Not too mention how much longer the drive will last. Could be years or could be weeks. It’s a risk with your data.

[Bastille]

Congrats for your 100th thread !

Regarding refurb I usually avoid speaking about electronic devices, however sometimes when I know I'll not use them very often I might take the risk.

Regarding HDD well ... it also depends. If you buy from a profesional / company you have 90% of chance that they have been used for years 24/7, at least you can ask for a CystalDisk info report (you'll be able to see how many times sectors have been written, how many hours the disks have been used, if there are unreadable sectors, and so on).

[webdev77]

I wouldn't do refurbs unless you are willing to accept drive failure. You must be okay with at least one or two drives failing. Plan accordingly if you're going to do it so you aren't one of those people who asks who to un-delete their lost forever important files.

[Mercury]

I wouldn't do refurbs unless you are willing to accept drive failure. You must be okay with at least one or two drives failing. Plan accordingly if you're going to do it so you aren't one of those people who asks who to un-delete their lost forever important files.

The redundancy I would have with raid is the only reason I'm even considering it. It would be absolute dogshit if both failed though.

[Egregious]

Never get refurbished drives. I used to only buy new, but I (any many others) have started buying Manufacturer Recertified drives and they have all been solid. I always go for enterprise-grade drives, specifically the Seagate Exos X-series lineup. You can get something like an Exos X24 24TB or an Exos X22 22TB at very nice prices over at ServerPartDeals. My current Plex setup is approaching 30TB and continues to slowly grow over time.

[XtremeDiscount]

New Storage! And if it’s new and it’s a mechanic drive things can still go wrong. I would be careful

[LeetSpeed]

Buy new storage drives all the refrubs I bought in the past failed on me.

[Doug Dimmadome]

Like all things in IT, it depends. I'm currently rocking 4x 3TB WD Red drives in RAID 5 I got used from work. They served four years in a company server and have been powering my Plex archive for over a year now with no issues.

If you're getting a killer deal, maybe buy a few more than you need and use a RAID configuration that allows a drive failure so you can swap out if needed. If you want to play it safe and don't want to deal with all that, buy new.

[Mercury]

Like all things in IT, it depends. I'm currently rocking 4x 3TB WD Red drives in RAID 5 I got used from work. They served four years in a company server and have been powering my Plex archive for over a year now with no issues.

If you're getting a killer deal, maybe buy a few more than you need and use a RAID configuration that allows a drive failure so you can swap out if needed. If you want to play it safe and don't want to deal with all that, buy new.

This is the goal. I need a raid configuration anyway for my plex setup so I have no issue getting multiple drives. That's actually why I've been considering going this route.