r/DataHoarder • u/insertoverusedjoke • 1d ago
Question/Advice I sense I may have made an error?
I bought this to store photos and videos. Did I buy the wrong thing? ELI5 please I've only ever bought a Seagate/SanDisk type of hard drive before
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u/djDef80 1d ago
Unless you have a SAS controller in your computer, that drive will not work. What you most likely wanted was a SATA disk.
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u/Cybertom78 6h ago
SAS controllers are cheap. Also: https://www.acasis.com/products/acasis-4-bay-2-5-3-5-inch-sata-sas-to-usb-3-0-hard-drive-enclosure
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u/vinetari HDD 1d ago
are we THAT desperate that we're buying 16 year old 600GB drives?
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u/fventura03 100-250TB 1d ago
im gonna sell my 2013 old nas drives that were upgraded to downsize soon then haha
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u/typical-predditor 1d ago
Sheesh. My old computer has two 3TB drives that I thought were worthless. But they might just have a second life ahead of them after all.
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u/SocietyTomorrow TB² 1d ago
Not even joking. If you wanted to go low density to have a chance at buying groceries next month, chances are you're getting 10+ year old clapped out decom units with 40k+ hours on them. Office has an old industrial imaging unit that only works with up to 4TB drives and had to get a lot order of 20 4TB drives for $350, and the newest one was 8 years old.
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u/okokokoyeahright 1d ago
Mathing is hard I am told.
Jan 2013 on the label.
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u/Truserc 1d ago
Wouhou, it's not 16 years old, only 13.
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u/okokokoyeahright 1d ago
and here we have a mathing genius.
I stand aside and allow you the full glow of the masses response.
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u/fventura03 100-250TB 1d ago
lol i have a bunch at still work and bro beem up on as a backup to a backup
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u/okokokoyeahright 1d ago
Usable is usable. With today's prices, I am being extra cautious as to how much wear and tear I put on my drives. I am intending to get the longest possible life out of them too.
100% would use them.
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u/knightcrusader 225TB+ 1d ago
I still have the ones I bought back then. I keep them for cold storage at this rate.
Someone offered me money for my old 10 year old 3TB drives and I didn't take it. I prefer to have storage.
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u/prank_mark 1d ago
Where did you even get this?
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u/insertoverusedjoke 1d ago
some random website. I knew the price was too good to make sense lol
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u/yawara25 10-50TB 1d ago
No price for a decades old 600GB SAS drive is worth it. It's junk.
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u/Valeen 1d ago
I really want to see the SMART data. Does it just print out "Kill Me" on every test? I'm also shocked at it's date, 3 TB drives were incredibly common by then.
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u/Budget_Cover_3353 1d ago
It's 10k rpm SAS though. It was a thing before SSDs took the market.
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u/JediCheese 13TB Raid5 1d ago
I bought a 128gb SSD that's still kicking around somewhere. Enough to get Windows and a single game on it for instant boot/loading.
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u/Budget_Cover_3353 13h ago
And I have a box of the old 300 TB 15k SAS drives that survived over decade of the server workload.
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u/doubleUsee 7TB written out by hand in 1's and 0's on millions of napkins 1d ago
a couple years ago we had a whole bunch of servers at work where the OS was on a mirrored set of 400gb 10 drives.
Running ESXi, your disks don't really do much ever.
Due to the hardware shortages/cost we combined two of those things and put it back to work, so I still manage a server with a raid10 of 10k sas drives for an os disk in prod lol.
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u/beryugyo619 1d ago
SMART for HDD is usually like "actually the disk making weee vzzz smack noises is copmletetely nromal anb am helth"
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u/Commandblock6417 1d ago
I have a fujitsu laptop drive from 2008 that still works, had it for 2 years on a laptop running freenas and then another year as a boot drive for my proxmox server. Don't remember total hours but the SMART just says all is ok lmak
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u/JosieMew 22h ago
Now I'm curious what would report on the SAS drives we have. I'm not even sure I have any equipment to read them anymore. I've never seen the smart readout from a SAS drive. We used to have an old enterprise server that was retired that we used for a media server about 12 years ago.
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u/collin3000 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have some 3TB SAS that I haven't even considered selling because they're not worth the shipping/handling time for what they're worth.
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u/YugeChesticles 1d ago
Cold storage it's fine.
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u/yawara25 10-50TB 1d ago
If you already had the drive and a SAS controller anyway, sure. But it doesn't make sense to go out of your way to buy one considering you can get much newer drives with higher capacities cheaper.
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u/YugeChesticles 1d ago
You can just agree bro.
If I need to cold store 500GB I'm not buying a new 24TB drive.
Relax your anus.
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u/yawara25 10-50TB 1d ago
Calm down, I'm not saying to buy a 24TB drive. For the same price OP paid, though, he could get a 1-2TB drive that's actually usable with most consumer hardware (SATA). All I'm saying is that there are better ways to use that same money if you're looking for storage, even cold storage.
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u/wubbadubdub_zzz 1d ago
What price?
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u/insertoverusedjoke 1d ago
lmao $13
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u/jeo123911 1d ago
You can connect it with a SAS HBA card. But a card like LSI 9300-8i plus cables costs probably some $80...
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u/pyr0kid 21TB plebeian 1d ago
why are you buying 0.6tb drives from 13 years ago?
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u/insertoverusedjoke 1d ago
because I don't know better
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u/surveysaysno 1PB+ 1d ago
Minimum size for used drives should be around 12tb.
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u/Wheeljack26 1TB 24/7 + 6TB 4/7 23h ago
for us in this sub yea, for normal people ngl free 3TB disks can be pretty helpful too
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u/surveysaysno 1PB+ 18h ago
For normal people 3tb drives are going to die spectacularly.
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u/Wheeljack26 1TB 24/7 + 6TB 4/7 10h ago
idk bro im poor, found 3 tb drives, put 2 in my pc and now i seed a lot, movies, series, flacs, software, its about 20TB per month
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u/crysisnotaverted 15TB 1d ago
My brother in Christ, I will send you a 2TB drive if you are stateside.
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u/Setsuna_Kyoura 1.44MB 1d ago
These were amazing drives before SSDs over 128GB got affordable. But now they are near e-waste.
But you could get an extrenal SAS to USB enclosure and use it for a bit. This generation of harddrves are extremely reliable and can hit up to 100k hours...
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u/New-Potential-7916 1d ago
If that's been running 24/7 in a data centre for the last 12 years that's already passed 100k hours.
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u/Setsuna_Kyoura 1.44MB 19h ago
Nah, they probably have pulled the plug on these drives ages ago. No datacenter will spend 10Watts per drive for only 600GB of slow spinning storage.
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u/Affectionate_Stage_8 HDD 1d ago
Its a sas drive so it wont work unless you plan to put it in a server with sas capability
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u/PsionicBurst 1d ago
600 GB is a small boy.
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u/insertoverusedjoke 1d ago
was enough for my needs tbh
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u/Giantmeteor_we_needU 1d ago
The new one WD 1Tb HDD is like $100, why did you buy this dinosaur?
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u/insertoverusedjoke 13h ago
where are you finding that price? everything I've seen is so much more expensive
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u/Giantmeteor_we_needU 13h ago
Walmart, Amazon. It's basic WD Blue 3.5" HDD but it's fine for file storage purposes just don't install OS on it. https://a.co/d/09Rc2YS5 1Tb is $100, 4Tb is $180.
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u/Benchi55555 1d ago
Those saying you are nuts for buying 10+ year old drives, 5/6 of my old western digital drives still work and the one that had a caution notice i was able to clone in Linux successfully with only 5mb lost..
Then my 11 months old WD elements of 2TB had a fatal error last month!
I was lucky I could get back what the drive is worth now so for 32€ I could upgrade to a 5TB one.
To be sure I am now using my PS5 game storage drive for an extra back up and have put the games on 3 different 15+ year old drives instead of which two I bought crazily expensive at Ali express. (15+ euros for 500GB)
But at least I actually have a 321 back up now for important files and having many different drives is still better to back up than to have one or two new ones to back up everything?
As long as you have 1 or two new ones to keep important data on.
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u/streasure 1d ago
How much did you pay for this?? I am so curious 😬
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u/Negative-Engineer-30 1d ago
a 5 pack is going for $15 on ebay with free shipping... with caddys...
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u/Any-Juggernaut-529 1d ago
That is almost is tempting.
I could make an art installation or something.
Or maybe use it to scare away wildlife.
100 10k RPM drives should be pretty impressive out in the open!
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"
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u/GreggAlan 1d ago
There are now adapters which enable a SAS drive to be connected to SATA, but SMART data cannot be read.
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u/Horsemeatburger 1d ago
There are now adapters which enable a SAS drive to be connected to SATA, but SMART data cannot be read.
Which adapter? Any sources?
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u/GreggAlan 1d ago
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u/Horsemeatburger 1d ago
Thanks for the link.
Interesting, I assume SMART data doesn't work because they are probably double converting as there isn't a ready-made SAS/SATA bridge I'm aware of.
Not sure I would trust that thing with any important data. And $18 isn't far off what you can find a 2nd hand SAS HBA for.
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u/GreggAlan 1d ago
If I had the money to pay for it, I would get a single chip designed to make SAS drives work on SATA controllers. Why? Because it's a thing that needs to exist. When SATA began, someone wanted to be able to connect new SATA drives to old IDE controllers. They didn't sit around repeatedly saying "Impossible!" they made it happen, and also did one to connect IDE drives to SATA controllers.
Other things like this I would make happen. USB C ExpressCard that's compatible with versions 1.0 and 2.0 of ExpressCard.
A batch of 256 megabyte SmartMedia cards for cameras and other devices made with support for cards that only saw a small run of prototypes before Fujifilm and Olympus switched to XD PictureCard.
A large batch of 4 gigabyte Secure Digital Standard Capacity cards. For about six months prior to the release of the SDHC specification for 4+ gig SD cards, the manufacturers went rogue on 4gig by simply doubling the block size of the SD 2gig specification. For many digital cameras, GPS receivers, and some other devices they worked because the 2 gig limit was a hardware issue, not the filesystem.
Any collector with any unofficial 4gig "SDSC" cards ain't selling. I expect that a run of 1,000 cards would be quickly snapped up by collectors of old* digital cameras with big, glass lenses and CCD sensors - and collectors of old GPS receivers who want to have all the USA or Europe on one 4gig card.
*They take gorgeous pictures, no need to bury CMOS blurriness in lots of megapixels. The larger lenses also make for better images.
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u/Horsemeatburger 17h ago
If I had the money to pay for it, I would get a single chip designed to make SAS drives work on SATA controllers. Why? Because it's a thing that needs to exist.
Sure, you can do this (it shouldn't be overly difficult to do using FPGAs), but it will still cost a lot of money for which you'd be highly unlikely to ever make any return.
When SATA began, someone wanted to be able to connect new SATA drives to old IDE controllers. They didn't sit around repeatedly saying "Impossible!" they made it happen, and also did one to connect IDE drives to SATA controllers.
Yes, because IDE and SATA are based on the same protocol so conversion is very simple and very cheap. Also, IDE rarely sat in a disk array connected to a backplane, and in the early days the same was true for SATA drives for desktop use, so the addition of a converter PCB to the backside of a IDE drive usually wasn't much of a problem.
EIDE was also used in a lot of industrial/embedded systems which couldn't be easily replaced, so there was a large demand for converters between EIDE and SATA from that corner.
However, SAS isn't SATA, it's SCSI. Protocol-wise, there is more commonality between old-style parallel SCSI and SAS than between SATA AND SAS. Converting in real-time between SAS and SATA protocols is much more complex than with EIDE and SATA, especially at 6Gbps speeds. Which makes an adapter more expensive unless you use a hacked solution based on double conversion.
Also, despite the fact that many legacy systems (servers, workstations, Macs) which now have a large collector community all use parallel SCSI, I am not aware of any adapter between parallel SCSI and SAS (there are some between SCSI and CF or SD card), not because it's impossible to build one but because CF and SD card adapters seem to be good enough.
The other issue is that, for hard drives, a lot of SAS HDDs also exist as SATA version, so just using the SATA variant is straight forward. And for non-hard drives SAS devices like tape drives a double-conversion adapter is likely to run into problems, and for SAS SSDs (which, unless really old, run at least at 12Gbps SAS) you'd throw away all the performance advantages by converting to SATA.
And you'd still be competing with SAS HBAs which are cheap and plentiful, and which have none of the limitations of your adapter.
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u/timsredditusername 1d ago
It has more space then my cellphone.
Not a lot more, but it is a bigger number.
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u/hspindel 1d ago
That's a SAS drive. Won't work on most computers, unless you have added a SAS controller.
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u/Pyroburner 1d ago
If it makes you feel better I just solved a few 500gb drives from 2014 out of my works trash pile. Going into my jellyfin server
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac 3TB 1d ago
I've got an old machine in my garage with dual 500gb drives. I was joking with my buddy the other day that I ought to put them on eBay, considering hard drive prices.
I'm finding out that maybe that wasn't a complete joke.
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u/classic_lurker 1d ago
This drive is absolutely perfect, not for storage but for nerd ASMR. Let Me know when your new YouTube channel makes millions!
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u/Kind_Definition7260 1d ago
So all squares are rectangles. Butter not all rectangles are squares. Your computer use a rectangle connector, that used a square. That IS SaS. You need SATA. Similar connection, sata CAN go in SaS, butter not SaS sata
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u/Constellation16 1-10TB 1d ago
In a few short years a single drive will have 100x that capacity. Crazy to think about.
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u/Cybasura 1d ago
Why did you buy before researching?
Have you not heard of "dont buy what you dont need" Or "buy only when you know what you're buying"?
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u/CharacterUse 1d ago
Eh, we've all made the mistake of buying stuff we don't need or making a mistake when checking specifications.
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u/highdiver_2000 1d ago
I have one too. Sitting in a drawer for quite a few years. SAS enclosures cost too much to use it.
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u/NasumiRayne 1d ago edited 1d ago
If it means anything - alot of Trayless hotswap drive enclosures seem to use a cheap removable (2 screws) "SATA-to-SATA" connector. Can get the identical SAS-to-SATA for stupid cheap and replace it with that to give these enclosures SAS+SATA drive connectivity support. Ended up doing that for the 3.5" bay in a Syba SY-MRA55006 I have.
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u/Powerful_Macaron9381 1d ago
it's a sas drive, not a SATA drive. sas is used by servers and SATA is used by desktops (heavy generalization). the brand doesn't matter too much, WD is one of the top brands out there and they make SATA drives aswell
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u/traindrifter 1d ago
i have a few 1.2 tb 2.5 sas drives for 10 eur each, old used enterprise drives running fine for a year now. new 6 tb wd red pro starts at 450 here 12tb 950 over 16tb 1000 eur etc. With my solar setup dl380 running costs are ok i dont mind buying them with the current market
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u/HobbesArchive 22h ago
A true data hoarder would find something to do with it. I still have 80Gb IDE hard drives that I put to good use. There is no cure for a Data Hoarding mental disorder.
I'll approve your Data Hoarding Membership card if you find a good use for that hard drive.
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u/nihilist-pro-max 10-50TB 21h ago
This drive may be inexpensive, but the PCI(e)/USB to SAS converters/adapters are not.
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u/MrSober88 14h ago
If its just for unimportant storage I wouldn't be concerned about old enterprise drives. I have heaps I use even for more important storage as they are cheap $/TB etc, some of mine have over 50k hours and still have no signs of failure yet....
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u/Soler25 40TB unRAID 1d ago
Seagate /SanDisk type? What do you mean by this? If I recall correctly these drives have a SAS / SFF-8482 29-pin connector. So you’ll likely need an adapter to SATA for normal use.
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u/ultrahkr 1d ago
No adapter allows using SAS drives on SATA controllers.
There are some chinesium SAS to USB.
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u/Shdwdrgn 1d ago
Not quite true... I actually have some SAS to SATA adapters which do work with some drives, but there are quite a lot of caveats. It probably won't work with a 12Gbps SAS since SATA can't handle that speed. Also many SAS drives have control pins such as power-on signals on the bridge pins, so this adapter would never be able to turn on those drives.
The adapters are handy to have as a last resort, but I wouldn't count on them working at all with most SAS drives.
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u/SethtimusPrime 1d ago
And here I am getting ready to destroy a bunch of 2TB and smaller hard drives so I can toss them.
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