I’m currently a student so I don’t have thousands to spend on hard drives and I’d really love to make a compact storage server with large capacity to do stuff like a Plex server. I’ve been looking and I see good deals on sites like eBay, however they seem too cheap sometimes. What are things I should look out for/should I just not get used hard drives?
I need to mention this would not be for critical data such as personal photos etc. it would just be raw data storage that I could afford to lose- it would just be a pain.
They’re always a gamble.
Sometimes you have another decade of life in them and sometimes they fail within a month. I wouldn’t bother unless I was getting an insanely good deal (like over 50% off retail) as I’m likely to replace it within the year.
I also wouldn’t trust them outside of a mirrored or pairity RAID just in case the data on that disk proves to be important