Purchasing multiple drives

[Koala]

A long time ago I read somewhere that if purchasing multiple drives for a RAID you should either space out your purchases or buy from different sellers. Is that actually true? If so, what strategy would people recommend? Just buy one a month from newegg or whatever for 6 months?

 

[BigDave]

Buying from different sellers sometimes decrease the change of receiving product
that comes from the *same* production run from a given manufacturer, so yes,
I believe it has merit to some degree at least, although common distribution practice
is to ship older runs of stock first so as a consumer you have little control over this.
Put the vendors to work for you, tell them your issues/concerns and have them reveal
*lot numbers* (or however manufacturers indentify production runs) off their inventory.

My preference is to buy my drives locally and NEVER purchase drives that are shipped
cross-country in a box that gets tossed around by a package delivery service. IMHO it's
this rough treatment that causes a great majority of the so called "infant mortality"
issues with hard disks that arrive DOA or die within weeks.

 

[Koala]

Good point, I'll try to see if I can source them locally. At least I should be able to go to BestBuy.

 

[Arwen]

Another way to buy drives, is to use either different models, (though same size).
Or different manufacturers, like some WDs, some Seagate, some Hitachi, etc...
All from the vendor's NAS line.

For my build of 4 x 4TB drives, I did a bit of over-kill, (I wanted high reliability);

1 - WD Red bought locally with retail packaging
1 - WD Red Pro bought mail order
1 - WD Red bought locally but with bulk packaging
1 - WD Red Pro bought mail order 1 month later than first

If I had to do it over again, I'd get one from Seagate, (replacing the second locally
bought drive). And one bought from Hitachi, replacing the second WD Red Pro.

Note: The WD Red Pros are more expensive and don't buy me any speed improvement
when combined with plain Reds. But, they SHOULD have different failure characteristics,
so my RAID-Z2 should survive any reasonable failure. (Earth got hit by a meteor recently .

 

[Pheran]

A long time ago I read somewhere that if purchasing multiple drives for a RAID you should either space out your purchases or buy from different sellers. Is that actually true? If so, what strategy would people recommend? Just buy one a month from newegg or whatever for 6 months?

This is one of the few things I've seen on this board that I completely disagree with. I would much rather have a consistent set of drives with a common set of issues (if any) that I can easily troubleshoot, not a mishmash of stuff that will potentially interact in unpredictable ways. I also don't agree with the "avoiding shipping" idea. These kinds of issues are what periodic SMART testing is for, not to mention that those drives got shipped to the store anyway, and you have no idea how.

Designing a solid server with data protection (e.g. RAID-Z2) that monitors its own health status and warns you about impending problems, plus having a good backup, is far more important than worrying about trivial details like how you bought your drives.

Speaking of buying drives, Newegg has 4TB HGST NAS drives on sale right now for $140.

 

[Mirfster]

I see the validity to everyone's reasons. Myself, I buy used/refurbished, in lots; from a small set of trusted sellers on eBay. I take the "gamble"; but do make sure to burn them in pretty quickly. I am a HGST guy and run 7200 RPM (yeah, I am bad..). Only have had one fail (from shipping I think) in a couple years. Of course, I do also make sure to have "cold spares" too. I am not above swapping daughter-boards either (if needed) since I do usually have drives from the same lot.

 

[Mr_N]

same ive only found one bad drive out of 14 HGST SAS shipped, and it was replaced with new.
if your buying enterprise drives and burning them in properly i dont see the need to go to so much effort to mix up sources, if your buying cheap or refurb drives maybe you should :)

 

[ethereal]

i used to be a real snob - i bought enterprise equipment with long warranties for my workstation (this obviously very expensive and i was paying for things i didn't need)

now i hope i am a little smarter - i recently bought 2 used intel ssds for freenas boot (they have years of warranty left) - and i also bought 2 used wd 3 TB hdds $75each (one had been used for 3 months and the other 6 months. the warranties are 6 months and 9 months) .

i ran badblocks on the hdds and there were good and are now in one of my pools.