Hello,
Bought a spare super cheap used 3TB drive a year ago, and just figured out it’s not a SATA but a SAS drive.
How fucked am I? What can I do more than using it as a paperweight?
Cheers!
I’ve seen SAS-SATA adapters for sale online. I got a 120GB used SAS, and it’s cheaper to buy another drive than to order the adapter.
Those adapters only work for plugging SATA drives into SAS controllers. You can’t use an adapter to plug a SAS drive into a SATA port
No, they can’t. You need a SAS controller for a SAS drive, there is no way around it
Why buy a used drive? Save $12? F that.
I don’t know where you live but I got the drive for 30€ including shipping, a new drive is over 100€…
And then two years down the line you lose all the data - the pictures, the savegames, the porn collection. Drives are the one thing that shouldn’t be bought used
Not if you have a proper backup plan.
I have about 200ish TB or about 24 drives and 3 of them failed all are used. I have a solid backup plan so no issues with failing drives. Saves me roughly 100-200 a drive.
New drives have infant mortality as well. An inverse bell curve would be the distribution.
Look, i’m buying two hard drives no matter what to anticipate a drive failure. In that case, if i’m anticipating a failure anyway, might as well buy them second-hand and, yes, save a ton of money.
The key is to look for a CrystalDiskInfo screenshot in the ad, which is indicative of a serious seller and also lets you know the drive’s condition. If you buy from a professional, you may get a warranty.
I learned the hard way when the cheap PSU blew up and took with it the mobo, my drive and my backup drive. That was the year 2000 or 2001.
Since then I do have a good backup strategy (with most important stuff on amazon glacier).
So you learned the hard way losing your porn stash 😉 ?
Jk, and the drive is not for important stuff.
bullshit. drives should be backed up if the data is important which makes refurb and used drives perfectly acceptable. raid and good backups exists for a reason and don’t leave you to rely on one single drive to live forever.
if you’re buying large drives and not using a system with raid functionality, you’re setting yourself up for failure, new drive or not. no crying you were warned.
This is all assuming it’s a spinning disk and not an SSD, so ignore me if that’s the case:
Given SAS drives are usually used in data centre storage array applications and 3TB disks have been kinda small for that use case for a fair while, there’s a fairly high chance it was in heavy use for a good number of years. I’d bet it’s probably well on its way to being a paperweight regardless of your connectivity situation.
If you do get it hooked up, don’t store anything on it you wouldn’t be okay losing.
Yep spinning rust.
Wanted a scratch disk to aggregate all my sensitive information thats scattered and duplicated on smaller disks and thumb drives. Would probably keep it as an ultimate backup too (I got a real backup).
My thinking was that usually those disks are swapped out after 5 years when failure rates starts to creep up, but there’s still is some life left, largely enough for some fun.
Yust buy a SAS controller (with cables), they are used pretty cheap.