Is it normal for a used enterprise drive to arrive with 41000 power on hours

Question

Bought four secondhand 12TB drives from a seller who described them as pulls from a datacentre. They arrived, all four report between 39000 and 41000 power on…

chmod_confused · Accepted Answer

Normal for the category and not a reason to panic on its own. Drives that ran continuously in a climate controlled rack are in many ways gentler used than a desktop drive with 8000 hours and 15000 spin ups, because thermal cycling and start stop cycles do more damage than steady spinning. Clean SMART at 41000 hours is…

quietpackets · Answer

Run the full surface read now, before you put data on them, and then again after 30 days. Infant mortality in used drives shows up early, and the entire point of buying cheap used capacity is that you planned for one to die.

stdlib_stef · Answer

The real question is not the hours, it is whether your redundancy and backup plan assumes these drives will fail. If it does, 41000 hours is a bargain. If your plan is that they must not fail, no drive is cheap enough.

shore_power_shay · Answer

Check the temperature they report under load too. Datacentre drives are often specified for higher airflow than a quiet home case provides, and a 12TB helium drive at 50C in a silent case will not last four more years.

epoxy_puddle · Answer

Mine have 55000 hours and have been running for two more years since I bought them. Anecdotal, but the doom stories are mostly from people who bought one drive and had no backup.

Is it normal for a used enterprise drive to arrive with 41000 power on hours Help

8 answers