[geeks] Quiet SCSI drives

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 @ 10:56 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > I get nervous buying used, mainly because sellers never tell how old the
> > drives are, or what their service time and conditions were.  It would be
> > nice if those who tested the drives would put the SMART output on the
> > listing.
> 
> I usually buy new just for that reason.  You could argue that if you get
> enough of 'em (2 or 3 used for the price of 1 new), in combination with
> the judicious use of cold spares and RAID1, RAID5 or RAID6, the risks
> are minimized.

True.  A lot of times, I get good drives that run for years.  But too
many have also been duds.

Less of a problem with used SCSI than ATA.  

But for SCSI, there are fewer deals on them now than in recent years, so
I'm starting to look more at used drives.  It's like pulling teeth, but
I have gotten a few sellers to at least give me manufacture dates.

Most of them seem to be from 2002, which is not great for a drive in a
hot RAID (what most seem to be).

> Bad part about eBay... you can get new drives from Newegg - shipped -
> for less than their buy-it-now prices :rollseyes:

Yeah, you have to be careful.

These days, my searches have a maximum price.  If it isn't a deal, I
rarely bother, unless the drives are new.

I used to use a website that found really low prices, but I've lost the
URL, and have no idea at all what it was called.  I used it all the time
but some time in the last year lost it.

> The models I listed were released to market within the last 4 years,
> and a lot of used drives off eBay will still have the manufacturer's
> warranty - you just gotta be careful of Sun, HP, Dell, etc pulls, as
> the manufacturer won't warranty those.

I usually try to get vanilla Seagate or other OEM drives for that
reason.

One thing I'm curious about is how good Samsung drives are.  They seem
to be priced lower than Seagate, but I've not heard anything at
all about their quality.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The determined programmer can write a
FORTRAN program in any language." ]