OK SORRY SO I WAS ON YOUTUBE AND FOR SOME REASON GOT SUCKED INTO A VIDEO
By a particular channel that I hate, for always being fucking wrong about stuff, and it brought me back to this post. Youtubers just straight up Getting Shit Wrong when it comes to not new things.
The premise of the video is basically "You shouldn't buy used hard drives, they're not safe!" Which is... in my experience, mostly not true. This is a big channel so I don't know if I should be angry at them for spreading misinformation (assuming they're dumb and not malicious) about them, or be glad that they're keeping The Unwashed Masses off of the good deals.
But then they just compared it to buying used GPUs that might have been mined on and.... is that a thing? Like is that Actually A Thing? Last I checked ex mining cards tend to actually be in really good kit. GPUs don't wear out, especially if they're being undervolted.
So the rest of this post is a liveblog of the rest of the video. Because this is too dumb for a whole post but if I do not type it to someone I will go insane.
"They might be ex mining drives" This dates the video a bit. Also this channel was going "well if you have a GPU you might as well mine with it!" during the height of the GPU mining bubble so you can't pretend you hate it now. That being said, I could see an argument being made for mechanical drives getting absolutely trashed by mining... but enterprise drives should have been designed for that anyway so, maybe not? Better argument than GPUs anyway.
"We'd recommend 20, maybe 25 thousand power on hours at most" lololololol you sweet summer child I MUST RUN MY 4TB DRIVES TO 200K NOW
"We got some drives that were packed terribly" seller's problem. To be fair they didn't dwell on this.
"But there's no warranty if they're refurbs! It's just the seller warranty!" who actually uses drive warranties? Like if they die your data goes and they don't pay for getting the data off, they just send you a refurb drive as a replacement. I'd bet only shops and businesses use drive warranties, normal people use them as "we pwomise the dwive wont bweak!"
They don't know enough to see all of the data missing from some of the drives and speculate that the firmware might not be original. Then again I think these are SATA so who fuckin' knows. SATA drives get the short end of the stick.
"Gigabytes per dollar" it's dollars per terrabyte you idiot, why the fuck would you do gigabytes per dollar? NO ONE USES THIS
First fully correct fact of the video: Use an old office machine for a NAS.
Aw fuck they're going to keep using this fucking gigabyte per dollar metric. Hang on I'm going to do conversions now so I can keep track. This must be what you metric users feel like.
"You could use a different RAID layout with more drives" I'm holding my tongue on the key miss until the end.
"But you can shuck drives!" welcome to 2015 buddy
"But new drives go on sale!" for $14 a TB lol, but go on keep ignoring the bathtub curve.
"Knowing your important data is on a new drive might help you feel more at ease" I fucking hate this. Trust your data to new product! Not used product! Used product is SCARY!
Which brings us right back to the start. I don't think anyone watching random videos on youtube just because they were trying to see someone doing useful things with high capacity SSDs (hi) wants to be told that just going out and buying cheap used shit is better than buying new shiny. I think, consciously or not, this crates bias for what profitable channels want to make videos about, or even their final opinions.
When it comes to hard drives, I think it's dumb to trust any drive, especially mechanical drives. ZFS is the solution to all of that, and neglecting to bring that up or the concept of "don't trust your hard drives" is just dumb.
Anyway the moral of the story is don't watch shit online you know is going to make you upset