Posted by: matthew_k
Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 26/03/2006 04:42
These are a love/hate item, but they're my favorite woot. My 500GB raid5 array is going up to the 1TB mark with a hot spare, I think. As usual, no idea how long the woot will last. Also great for replays/tivos/xboxes in need of upgrading.
Matthew
Posted by: lectric
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 26/03/2006 19:54
Hehe, I dunno. My data is too important to risk on a refurbed drive. Important to me, anyway.
Posted by: matthew_k
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 26/03/2006 20:32
I just think that's a bogus argument. Even if we accept that the refurbished drive is more likely to fail than a new drive, any data that's "too important for a refurbished drive" is too important to not be backed up.
My feeling is that any drive that's working properly now is no more likely to die than any other. I could be wrong, but then, these go into a raid array where it's not really an issue.
Matthew
Posted by: Dignan
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 26/03/2006 21:09
It's also a moot point if you have a RAID 5. I imagine the chance that more than one drive will fail at the exact same time is unlikely.
Unfortunately I saw this woot at around 1PM, which seems to have been about 10 hours too late
Posted by: lectric
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 27/03/2006 00:37
Granted, I'll admit it's just a mental block of mine. Then again, at work, when any drive on one of my arrays at work gets kicked out for the second time, I replace it. No questions asked. Call me paranoid. Backing up 250G+ at home can get rediculously expensive. Much cheaper to just mirror and be done with it.
Posted by: g_attrill
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 27/03/2006 10:03
That's what I'm planning to do imminently, just buy 2x 250Gb HDDs and copy my essential data over, then clone my 30Gb system drive onto the current 120Gb secondary drive and then I will be happy for a good while yet.
Actually, does anybody know whether it is recommended to use different makes (of an identical size) in a SATA RAID configuration? I know about the compatilbity concerns of the RAID array itself, which is partly why I'm going to get a PCI card. (The other reason being that my motherboard doesn't have on-board SATA and I don't need to upgrade the rest yet)
Gareth
Posted by: wfaulk
Re: Woot: Refurb 250GB HD's for $50 again - 30/03/2006 13:53
They do. Sun drives with the same part number seem identical from the OS (with the exception of the SCSI ID string).