SATA Drive Capacity Limited By 5400RPM Recommendation

That’s basically how I found a seller on the STH forum who had a fair supply of Seagate Exos and Ironwolf 20 TB drives. One of my 12 TB drives was reporting SMART errors out of warranty, I ended up upgrading the whole raidz2 array. The new drives have logged about 30 kh, which is actually slightly LESS than my own drives, and some residual warranty left because, contrary to mine, they have been used 24/7 since purchase, in an environemnt which has kept them well under 40°C at all time.
I expect, or hope, that they will start posting errors in a few years. Then I’ll try and do another round of upgrade with whatever (larger) refurbished drives I can find.

Drives are consumables.

2 Likes

This is why for my main pool I am using a 3-way mirror. Each manufacturer recertified drive costs less than purchasing brand new, where I have greater redundancy at around same cost of a comparable 2-way mirror of brand new drives.

I believe (maybe incorrectly?) that my chances are better with 3 “recertified” drives than with 2 brand new drives.

I think it wouldn’t be true if you account for the cost of a drive bay/slot. At least not for the average TrueNAS user (me).