Used SAS Drives for Dell Server

[Rock&Roll]

Wanted to do a sanity check with everyone here. Trying to discern if I'm a dumbass for buying used SAS drives for my home NAS.

Between the absurd price of new NAS drives and the recent SMR drama, I wound up buying 8pc of HUS726060ALS640 from an ebay seller. These are recycled / refurbished pulls from decommissioned servers.

Now, I'm new to buying used drives and I guess I imagined some pretty clean specimens. However, you can tell these were stored & handled somewhat roughly between old server to now. Labels are scratched / gouged a bit. One drive has a substantial dent over the voice coil area. I attached photos of the two worst examples. The rest of the drives aren't as bad.

That said, I've loaded them in my new/used T620 server. All drives spin up. SMART reports no errors. I've put in them in a RAID-10 with the H710 adapter. They passed a slow initialization and consistency check.

I figure, despite some dings and dents, the drive are working and I should move forward with putting them to use. I will be pulling the H710 and putting the drives on a JBOD HBA to use with freenas.

Given the light-duty home-use case these drives will need to endure for the next few years, should I have any reservations running them?

Obviously, external backups are in place either way.

 

[BinarySynapse]

As long as I had a decent back up strategy, I wouldn't have any problem running them into the ground.

 

[sinisterDei]

external backups are in place either way.

Because of this line right here, fire away.

You can't trust the SMART counters though, there are ways to manipulate those things. Mind, I don't know what those ways are, but I've seen refurbished SSDs and HDDs claim zero power on hours before when they were clearly used drives, and that to me says someone managed to wipe out the stats stored on the drive.