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Where To Get Sets and Parts For discussions about swapmeets, rallies, NVCF and BVWS, car boot sales, antique and charity shops, dealers, newspaper adverts, the local tip and just about any other source of equipment (other than eBay). |
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26th Nov 2018, 6:13 pm | #1 |
Heptode
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: LEEDS.......North of the River Aire.
Posts: 872
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Cheap hard drives
https://cpc.farnell.com/wd/wd3200avv...3gb/dp/CS31967
The full list: https://cpc.farnell.com/search?st=re...e&utm_campaign Last edited by brunel; 26th Nov 2018 at 6:15 pm. Reason: Added extra link |
26th Nov 2018, 6:29 pm | #2 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posts: 27,970
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Re: Cheap hard drives
They are certainly cheap enough, but you should note that they are 'recertified' so have an uncertain history. They are likely to be fine, but you may not want to use them for anything really critical.
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26th Nov 2018, 6:45 pm | #3 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: London, UK.
Posts: 3,687
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Re: Cheap hard drives
I wouldn't touch them myself. You'll find WD drives usually have a 2 or 5 year warranty depending on grade. These have 1 year. Plus they are mechanical.
A 250Gb Samsung SSD costs £55. A crucial 240Gb one costs £37. Both on Amazon. This tech is dead other than for archival and you want new, reliable drives for that! |
26th Nov 2018, 6:56 pm | #4 |
Administrator
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Cardiff
Posts: 9,073
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Re: Cheap hard drives
I won't touch recertified drives either. In my experience the likelihood of a further failure is much higher, around 50% of the ones I have encountered in the past had failed or were showing SMART warnings.
Basically they are faulty disks that have been fixed by hiding the bad sectors or even disabling a head/platter (with the capacity reduced and model number changed if necessary), and SMART data reset to hide the history. They are often sent out by drive manufacturers as warranty exchanges. If I ever get one it goes straight onto eBay or to CeX. If you want mechanical drives buy them new. They aren't expensive and are much less of a gamble then these recertified ones. |
26th Nov 2018, 7:08 pm | #5 |
Guest
Posts: n/a
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Yes, SSDs are getting ridiculously cheap these days.
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26th Nov 2018, 7:29 pm | #6 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2013
Location: Wigan, Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 9,433
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Re: Cheap hard drives
I have just bought a Crucial 500GB drive for around £65 to replace the two and a half year old 250GB SSD. The new larger drive was cheaper than the old one.
The old SSD will be installed in a portable caddy for data backup..
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Frank |
26th Nov 2018, 8:02 pm | #7 |
Octode
Join Date: May 2010
Location: Grantham, Lincolnshire, UK.
Posts: 1,177
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Ah yes, but the SSD drives aren't actually guaranteed to last, from what I have read. Unless you use them they will slowly, years, fade and die.
A mechanical drive doesn't suffer from this, if you put it in a RAID then the whole point of that is to provide restoration if one drive fails. My experience of mechanical drives is that they are very reliable. And the data doesn't fade with the passage of time. |
26th Nov 2018, 8:23 pm | #8 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2013
Location: Wigan, Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 9,433
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Both types have their problems, choose the type that suits your usage. SSD’s tend to be faster than standard PC HDD’s, that may not be the same for the 10,000 and 15,000rpm server drives. HDD’s are usually less expensive for very large capacities.
If the data is important I would not want to leave either a SDD or HDD on the shelf for years and be certain of it working.
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Frank |
26th Nov 2018, 9:21 pm | #9 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: London, UK.
Posts: 3,687
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Decent SSDs are way more reliable. Orders of magnitude. And when they do fail they fail slowly and predictably with reallocations and lifespan metrics falling rather than “clunk and the data is gone”.
Genuine desktop usage write lifespan is around 300 years. Retention is 10 years+. And that’s just the crap drives. I say this from experience as we replaced all of our spinning rust with SSDs over the last two years across servers and desktops totalling 500 odd drives. I haven’t heard of a single failure yet. Really the only reason they sell mechanical disks now is price/Gb is still better. That’s the only metric and that’s rapidly disappearing. |
26th Nov 2018, 9:34 pm | #10 |
Guest
Posts: n/a
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Re: Cheap hard drives
I opened my latest 500Gb SSD*, a pcb about 2x1 inches, four large memory chips and a smaller one, I guess 4Tb would fit easily. The rest was air!
*It's what one does with a new bit of kit, buy, take apart, reassemble, turn on, use and then read the manual. |
26th Nov 2018, 9:59 pm | #11 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2016
Location: London, UK.
Posts: 3,687
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Re: Cheap hard drives
First thing I did when I got mine as well, although I never read the manual
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26th Nov 2018, 10:35 pm | #12 |
Guest
Posts: n/a
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Reading the manual post operation is a handy parity check.
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26th Nov 2018, 10:47 pm | #13 |
Hexode
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK.
Posts: 483
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Re: Cheap hard drives
I bought a few 2Tb SAS drives for what they cost for my RAID array, will see what happens with them...
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26th Nov 2018, 11:42 pm | #14 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Staffordshire Moorlands, UK.
Posts: 5,274
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Re: Cheap hard drives
can you get PATA solid state drives?
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Kevin |
27th Nov 2018, 12:26 am | #15 |
Pentode
Join Date: Oct 2018
Location: Coventry, West Midlands, UK.
Posts: 220
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Re: Cheap hard drives
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27th Nov 2018, 12:31 am | #16 |
Moderator
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posts: 27,970
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Re: Cheap hard drives
As far as I'm aware, PATA SSDs are all NOS.
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27th Nov 2018, 4:21 am | #17 | |
Dekatron
Join Date: May 2006
Location: Invercargill, New Zealand
Posts: 3,458
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Quote:
In terms of performance, I had a client with write performance issues on a RAID10 15k SAS HDD array. After lots of to-ing and fro-ing, I added a couple of mixed use HPE SATA enterprise SSDs in RAID1 into the mix, and moved the VM over to that. Instant improvement, even though I'd normally have never considered SATA for server use, being SSD masked the issues with things like queue depth. Server was HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen 9 with SmartArray P440ar, 2 GB FBWC - just standard stuff. |
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27th Nov 2018, 10:10 am | #18 |
Heptode
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Ayr, Ayrshire, UK.
Posts: 631
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Re: Cheap hard drives
Well, I was just about to order the 40Gb one of those : https://cpc.farnell.com/samsung/mp04...20hard%20drive
to fix an old laptop I've got, but now I'm not so sure.. It needs to be 2.5" and have an EIDE interface. I've never used SSD's but they seem much more expensive and have a lower capacity. If these CPC ones aren't a good idea, what would you suggest I do ? Andy |
27th Nov 2018, 10:37 am | #19 |
Administrator
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Cardiff
Posts: 9,073
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Re: Cheap hard drives
For EIDE there isn't a lot of choice, either second hand or refurbished, and both are a gamble. Not much point in buying an SSD for such an elderly laptop, as it won't be able to run an operating system modern enough to properly support SSDs.
At least the CPC ones have a warranty (although that doesn't cover any data on the disk) and are cheap enough. Make sure you have backups of anything important. Never rely on a single drive as the only place data is stored, regardless of type or age etc. |
27th Nov 2018, 10:37 am | #20 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2013
Location: Wigan, Greater Manchester, UK.
Posts: 9,433
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Re: Cheap hard drives
For that price in an old laptop I would give it a try, how old is the laptop, the drive may out last other items in the computer.
Just have good backups. Crossed post with Paul but the same advice.
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Frank |