Wisdom of used enterprise HDs in home server?

[Kletter1mann]

Wondering about expandable storage for home media.

There are zillions of used enterprise-grade hard drives available for cheap - HP 146Gb 10K SAS units for example. Yes, they are used. Yes, they're closer to death than new drives. Yes, their capacity isn't that much.

OTOH, they're much faster than consumer-grade SATA drives. They are more reliable in the first place. And they're cheap. So are enclosures like this.

I already have the server and controllers to run setups like this so that's not an issue. What's the downside? Comments appreciated, thanks!

 

[synphul]

Other than power efficiency and size (needing more hdd's to provide the same space as larger/newer ones) you already know their life expectancy is questionable. They may run great, they may die sooner than later. If you were to run them in a mirrored raid configuration, so long as you didn't mind replacing out dead drives and had extras on hand it might work well. You might just have to replace them more frequently than if they were new.

Just be sure to keep backups of videos and audio (not sure what media you're referring to) on disc or something just in case if you're concerned about losing data. That way you can have archived backups in the odd event two drives in a mirrored array go out back to back.

 

[Kletter1mann]

Other than power efficiency and size (needing more hdd's to provide the same space as larger/newer ones) you already know their life expectancy is questionable. They may run great, they may die sooner than later. If you were to run them in a mirrored raid configuration, so long as you didn't mind replacing out dead drives and had extras on hand it might work well. You might just have to replace them more frequently than if they were new.

Just be sure to keep backups of videos and audio (not sure what media you're referring to) on disc or something just in case if you're concerned about losing data. That way you can have archived backups in the odd event two drives in a mirrored array go out back to back.

Yes, the plan is to mirror everything along with a couple hot spares. And yes, everything is backed up elsewhere. So that means go for it!

I quite like the idea of a W2K8 media server VM running on a 32Gb ESXi host running on a RAID10 array of 10k SAS drives. The array for media storage would be separate using consumer grade SATA drives, but also mirrored with hot spares. Whatever the system bottleneck might be, I doubt it will be W2K8.