this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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A friend of mine linked me to this seller earlier today. They have some pretty tempting deals, but I've never heard of them before.

Has anyone bought from them before and was it worth it?

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[–] kensand@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well then very little of what I said actually applies!

Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn't ideal for data durability. If you're ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don't buy used drives because I don't want to take the additional risk.

I'd be surprised if you can't find a better deal on used spinning rust though... the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 22 hours ago

Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn't ideal for data durability.

If it helps, my strategy is to use RAID6 to handle up to 2 drive failures, and apart from the initial 4 drives needed to initially create the array, I just add another when I need more space. Then even if I get drives with sequential serial numbers, they're going to have differing amount of life used.

Also, always keep a couple spare drives for quick swapping. Especially with RAID6 given how long rebuilding the array can take