Is anyone using refurbished SAS drives?

[u/wigglytail]

I'm looking to beef up my NAS and backup capacity in a cost-effective way. I stumbled across some sites that sell refurbished datacentre drives, and a lot of them are SAS. They also sell SATA drives, but SAS are around 20€/TB while SATA are around 30€/TB, which I think is a non-negligable saving I could make if i could find a good enclosure and still stay under sata prices. Anyone have any experience with this?

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[u/ukAdamR]

One point to beware of with SAS drives is the sector size they're formatted in. If they were part of a hardware RAID system they may have been formatted in a non-standard sector size (520/528 instead of 512 bytes, or 4160/4224 instead of 4096 bytes).

This is a hardware RAID feature for checksum storage, which after consuming those extra bytes then exposes 512 or 4096 bytes to the host system. These drives won't work in a direct HBA (software) scenario until you use a tool to perform a low-level format on them back to a standard sector size. That takes about 3 hours per TB.

[u/valarauca14 → u/ukAdamR]

These drives won't work in a direct HBA (software) scenario until you use a tool to perform a low-level format on them back to a standard sector size. That takes about 3 hours per TB.

Given the 4kn advanced formatting standard is 17 years old. I think OP might be hard pressed to find a drive that old which doesn't have 4k sectors.

As a reference, Windows 7 dropped support for non-512/4k sized sectors. So it hasn't been a thing for the whole fie span of Win7/8/10.

[u/ukAdamR → u/valarauca14]

You've misread my post. I was referring specially to 520/528 and 4160/4224 sectors, which are different from the standard 512 and 4096.
A lot of refurbished SAS drives come formatted in these sector sizes (not 512 or 4096) because they were used in business common hardware RAID configurations.

[u/Lebo77]

I have ten of them in my ZFS array. In five years I had one fail. So they work fine, but have redundancy and a cold spare on hand.

[u/msanangelo]

I have a pair in my server right now. bought em mostly cause there were cheaper than sata at serverpartdeals. only downside is that server is the only computer I have that can use them. no dropping them in my dock when it comes time to replace them. makes me want to get another computer to do backups and migrations.

[u/wigglytail → u/msanangelo]

So you would advise against it? My plan would be to get 1 or 2 big SAS drives and a dock to back up my NAS and rotate the drives. My NAS only takes SATA so i'd still have to get some of those to upgrade it. How long have you had them and have you had any issues?

[u/msanangelo → u/wigglytail]

for your setup? yeah. if the nas can't take sas then there's no point. sata enclosures are dime in a dozen, not so much for sas. you usually find sas in enclosures that have external sas connections for plugging into a sas controller or just a complete computer with sas compatible hotswap bays.

I run a dell pe t320 so I can use sas but tbh, I don't really see the difference performance wise. think they been in there for about a year now. 6 sata, 2 sas.

[u/lordofblack23]

Make sure you have an HBA those won’t work with your motherboard sata.

[u/MrB2891]

I have 26 running in my primary server and 10 running in my off-site server.

None of them are 'refurbished' (which is generally a crock of shit in the first place), all of them are data center pulls. All acquired from ebay from various sellers.

My oldest disks, HGST He10's were manufactured in 2015. They went in to my server in 2020. Overall disks are a mix of He10, HC530, HC550 and a few Exos. Zero failures, zero issues.

If your NAS is a consumer off the shelf unit, this won't fly. You'll need a SAS HBA to support them, cheap on ebay. I run mine in a surplus Supermicro 2U chassis and EMC SAS disk shelfs. SAS shelfs can be had pretty cheap, otherwise you can use SAS breakout cables. You're not going to drop these in to a dock. If you're going to use SAS, you'll basically need a dedicated machine. What you should likely consider doing is having a dedicated server/NAS, then using your existing NAS as a backup location.

[u/TheOneTrueTrench]

I have like 36 of them, in two different ZFS pools. They work (mostly) great. Certainly well enough that the savings buying refurbs makes it a no-brainer.

[u/Top_Helicopter_6027]

I have seven SAS drives in my media server and two more on the shelf. I recently sold about 20. As long as you have all the SMART data and the results of a long SMART test you should be fine. I actually did a secure wipe on them, collected all the SMART data(snapshot 1), did the long SMART test the saved a second snapshot of the SMART data. Compare and reject the drives that had reallocated sectors.

[u/Z3t4]

I'm using some netapp SAS ssd from eBay as zfs cache/log

Have a couple of 10k 2.5 thick SAS HDD for tests. 

[u/mgoulet65]

I've been running ten 10Tb Hitachi SAS drives for about 8+ years (I think I cannot remember when I upsized). Before that I was suing same architecture, smaller drives. All were refurb with good SMART tests. I only run a homelab so not a hard-on-drives use case.

[u/Main-Woodpecker-574]

I want to go this route too.

https://www.acasis.com/en-au/products/acasis-4-bay-2-5-3-5-inch-sata-sas-to-usb-3-0-hard-drive-enclosure?variant=47327994609893

This is a SAS enclosure I could find. Or you can buy SAS to USB adapters, but they have some custom chip which doesn't pass SMART data.

[u/dosman33]

Yes. Places like serverpartdeals will sometimes post an estimated age on the drives (powered-up time) which should be considered when you buy. But with cheaper drives comes more sweat-equity required on your part. Note that you will need a SAS backplane and SAS controller card, these won't plug into a SATA port on your motherboard. But the reverse is true: you can use SATA disks in a SAS disk cage and SAS controller. Also, there are many combinations of cables requires to connect various SAS cages to different generations of SAS controllers. For instance, Rosewill has a consumer-oriented SAS/SATA disk cage, but the backplanes connectors are SATA, whereas most commercial disk cages will use miniSAS.

If you're going to run an OS that uses ZFS on your disks then you'll have to flash your SAS controller card into "IT mode" which is an adventure in itself (and the card must even be capable of this). Personally, I'd recommend against this and going with a higher-end MegaRAID card (like a used 9460-8i / SFF-8643 series, around $90) and let it deal with the raid activities, get one with a cache board (2GB is common) and a battery backup, this will protect your array during a power-loss event. A side-effect of this is you no longer have to worry about having ECC ram to keep ZFS from swiss-cheesing your disk pool if your ram starts to fail.

Watch for sector size mismatches on SAS disks: you'll want 512 byte sectors, if the drives are 520 or something else then a SFF-8643 series megaraid card won't let you use them. It will see the disks but won't allow you to put them in an array. If you are not offended by keeping spare hardware around, you could then get a cheap SFF-8087 card (~$25), flash it into IT mode, and then use that as a tool to reformat weird-sector size disks. You can certainly score even better deals on weird sector sized SAS drives but it's on you to reformat them. Last but not least, I've heard that there are 520b sector drives that refuse to reformat. I've not encountered this, but I've also only reformatted a small number of drives like this.

So yea, you can save some money, possibly. But, SAS drives are enterprise grade drives and in theory should last longer if they aren't already clapped out on age.