I have a Dell Poweredge r720xd in RAID10. I’ve had a couple of drives fail since I’ve bought it and was able to buy cheap replacements on ebay.
I had another drive fail recently and one of the spare ebay drives came up as “blocked”. It put me out a few days while I waited for a new one to arrive; also from ebay.
I’d like to avoid getting another dud drive. Are there any reputable resellers of these old drives so I can stock up on some spares?
Someone more knowledge than me can correct me, but I’m pretty sure you could buy a newer bigger drive to replace an older drive. You obviously wouldn’t get the full capacity as it would be limited by the other older slower drives. However, you would get a, theoretically, more reliable drive than a random one on eBay. Then as you replace older drives eventually you could have increased size.
Caveat is that it will put stress on the old drive to rebuild, however you’d get that with any drive you put in. General wisdom I saw says to replace all the drives. Although that can be expensive.
I’m any case make sure you have a backup before you do any of the changes.
Damn I wish I would’ve known sooner. Isn’t there a concern of not matching the same drive similar to how you can’t mix and match RAM sticks?
I think mixing RAM sticks is mostly fine today. Maybe you won’t get 100% performance but I don’t think it will be very noticeable. You may still run into issues with some capacity combinations depending on the mainboard/cpu. Regarding clock speeds usually all run on the clock of the slowest one.
Matching RAM latency also matters for performance.
When using different capacity RAM channels matter so take care on the order of population.
