Used, populated DAS offering too good to be true? https://fckaf.de/2jX

So I found this eBay listing for a DAS
I know that the drives will probably have a ton of wear on them and won’t last decades, but for 12tb and like a usable 6tb with redundancy it shouldn’t be that bad, right?

Netapp disk shelves are popular for DAS, i think you can do some research, find reputable (recommended) sellers & see if that price is within the normal range.

I do not know. No. Maybe yes. Yes. Basically you ask for lottery numbers …

The market for these sorts of things second-hand is very small so you can often pick up ex-enterprise gear for peanuts.

Enterprises do not want because the support agreement is the same as new hardware, and they want support. e.g., go price up support contract cost on a 5 year old Netapp. It is literally cheaper to buy a new netapp! Netapp aren’t alone, its normally the case with most SAN/NAS storage vendors.

Most end users do not want because space/heat/noise.

So… often super cheap. And often totally fine/fully functional. Just out of support and EOL on the company books - so replaced.

All that said. AS above:

  • Most end users do not want because space/heat/noise.

You may find the shelf excessively noisy for your home, unless you have somewhere to store it out of the way…

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Oh also… if you look harder, you can find an entire netapp filer for that price i suspect - at auction sites :slight_smile:

So you can run Data onTap with it…

It’s all right but … there is also a dark side to it. The question was probably more about HDD than netapp. The problem with these ex enterprise is that you never really know what we are buying. Of course, these drives can be in perfect condition and work for years to come. And they might as well be one step away from the grave. In addition, ex enterprise are not only sold because the warranty but often the second factor that goes hand in hand with the warranty are small defects. I know the case of HP DAS box where everything looked to be ok but after installing 70 hdd it turned out very quickly that some backplane are F and not all drives will work and the seller does not consider this as a reason for complaint. That’s how it is with used equipment …

So in the end it still relies on luck…
6 fully redundant terabytes on 12k SAS drives with the enclosure are sooo tempting, so I might go for it, considering that that case is about 400€ in Germany and the standalone cases are about 250€

Everything really depends on your individual assessment of this situation. If the level of risk is acceptable to you within these limits of money then you can risk it.

I would assess it on the basis of whether if the worst case scenario works out, you are able to survive it.

There is a saying … Poor can not afford to buy cheap things.
Because the conclusion at the end of the day is that you take risks and if you are not lucky you will lose money that you have so little.

However, if this amount is not particularly significant and you can risk it. Assess the situation and make your own decisions.

Thats fair enough, the netapp comparison was merely an example and also for price comparison.

Their disk shelves (controllers too for that matter) are mostly commodity hardware anyway, the secret sauce is in Ontap. So heat/noise/support wise is likely the reason you can get the stuff so cheap - enterprise don’t want it and its overkill/noisy/etc. for home.

To get back to the OP’s dilemma though - i’d take a punt on it. its unlikely that ALL the drives have failed; so long as the backplane is fine you should be able to replace them anyhow. Or just configure a smaller raid group without the dead drive(s) in it.

Yeah I think that too, and if you assume that these 12k 450gb drives are good for another 35k hours, type that into the sth reliability calculator with Raid Z2(https://www.servethehome.com/raid-calculator/raid-reliability-calculator-simple-mttdl-model/) even with the full disk shelf active(9tb), I’d have a less than 1% chance of catastrophic data loss. And with the disk shelf for 300€ that seems to be a good deal.

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To mitigate the data loss probability, you could configure it as say:

3x RAID6 (RAIDZ2) groups of 6 drives each and 6 hot spares, and stripe across them to create a 3 stripe RAID60 (or ZFS equivalent). You might lose some space, but it should be fairly bulletproof and reasonably fast :smiley:

edit:
if you do run ZFS on it, i’d look up the ideal RAIDZx number of drives per group. IIRC there’s some magic that means some size RAIDZx work better than others. Can’t remember what the rules are off the top of my head.

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Can we quickly talk about Powerdraw please? I see this again and again with used Enterprisegear. This Diskshelf has 4 PSU’s and 24 Drives. Going by unconfirmed information from the Netapp Forum, this thing can pull north of 400W Fully equiped.
Where i live, this thing will blow through 800 Bucks worth of electricity MORE than a 4 bay x86 QNAP NAS per year. Electricity might be cheaper for you, but 6TB Drives aren’t really expensive anymore. Please make sure you do the math. If you want to have this as a “Lab environment” and to play with, it’s fine. If you think you’ll get cheap storage, i guess you could end up paying significantly more even compared to a decent NAS solution. Plus those things are really loud. Make sure you know where to put it. It’ll need decent airflow and will be loud enough for you to not wanting to have it near your workplace.

My personal opinion: Get a 4 bay QNAP Nas, put 4TB drives in it and be done. Higher initial investment, but probably cheaper and less hassle in the long run.

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Yup. That goes hand in hand with the noise due to big fuckoff fans in it.

Enterprise gear is great to play with to learn stuff. But if you want actual usable storage for cheap, you’re better off buying say 4 new 4TB drives and setting up RAID10 for similar usable space :smiley:

That said… as a VM store, this will be a lot quicker than 4x 4T drives.

But still much slower than a few drives with an SSD or two to cache it all…

1TB SSD’s are sub 100 bucks now. If you’re at the point where you want to run multiple VM’s for semi-production, i guess you’ll have hardware that’s at the higher end. I’d personally go with 3 1TB SSD’s in RAID 5 for all the OS files and stay with a NAS for storage.
Not exactly “Budget”, but still cheapish for the fact that we are talking virtual environment with grunt enough for 10-15 VM’s in terms of storage…

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Yup, agreed. I’ve got 3x 1 TB SSDs in this box i use for VM stuff. :smiley:

Not even RAID and plenty for homelab + general use. :+1:

It all depends on what OP wants to use it for.
If it is actually meant to be home only as a backup space for the Internet, then rather weak think, unless electricity and noise do not matter.
One or two Odroid HC2 as a simple small NAS for storing files for several machines in lan is enough for home. One as master and one possibly as a 1:1 backup.

Personally at home I use Odroid HC1 and works great for what it should be used for. Energy-saving(3W) and noiseless. In the case of HC2 and 10 / 16TB HDD and it is a nice toy … But if it is to be super efficient + VM and many disks and heavy I/O, it rather does not make sense.

Although …

PS
RAID is not a backup.

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