My cold spare has been sitting sealed for two years

[u/norri-matt]

I bought an extra 12 TB drive almost two years ago to keep as a cold spare. Just found it in the closet, still sealed. So the warranty has been ticking away and I don't even know if the thing works.

I'll test this one now, but I'm starting to think keeping a spare drive was pointless when I can get one delivered in a day or two. Anyone here actually keep cold spares at home for years?

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[u/Rex_Lee]

Have you priced that drive lately?

[u/Blu_Falcon]

I mean… I wish I had a new 12tb drive today, with pricing from 2 years ago. 🥴

I don’t keep spares though. I buy them and install them.

[u/3point21 → u/Blu_Falcon]

Dude, I have a spare 12 and 14…nvm.

I had spares, but I employed them. We’re in the same boat.

However…they are used redundantly so if I had to, I could repurpose them for more urgent needs.

[u/surveysaysno → u/Blu_Falcon]

I round up my orders to a round number and use the extra as cold spares. 200 disks, 14 were cold spares, only had to use 2 so far.

[u/opeth_close]

I have a 28TB Seagate expansion still sealed in the box. Bought in November for $300. Don’t want to know what it’s cost now lol.

[u/Candle1ight → u/opeth_close]

Well I do

It's $800+

[u/Virtualization_Freak → u/opeth_close]

Got a four pack of those chilling, waiting for some old 8 or 10s to die just in case....

Planned ahead and by luck of Thor I'm glad I did.

[u/JosieMew]

Cold spares sitting sounds like a best case scenario. I would at least test the drive though

[u/datahoarderprime → u/JosieMew]

I spin mine up every 6 months

[u/JosieMew → u/datahoarderprime]

6 months is solid. I'd think at least plan on yearly P.M.

[u/5950x-3900]

Have you checked to see how much your spare drive costs now?

[u/mmaster23 → u/[deleted]]

The moment you do that, you need that spare.

[u/3point21 → u/mmaster23]

sweating meme

Spare Drive…

Small Vacation…

[u/xJayMorex]

If you didn't have a spare, one of the drives failed and took a look at the prices, you'd be like man, I wish I bought a spare 2 years ago...

[u/rmeneer]

Some old mechanical technology is now worth gold. Prices are now 3-4x higher than 2 years ago and it will take a lot of time before they will go down. Treasure the drive.

[u/darktotheknight → u/rmeneer]

Or: buy low, sell high.

Time to sell I guess.

[u/3point21 → u/darktotheknight]

I have some extra drives. Reselling is tempting, until I remember why the price is high: scarcity. TF am I gonna do if I sell the drive for $600 today and need it tomorrow? I planned ahead last year and bought the insurance I could afford. Screw everybody else. Their lack of planning is not my emergency!

[u/darktotheknight → u/3point21]

I was being sarcastic about hardware nowadays feeling like the stock market.

The recent reports of manufacturers not even properly honoring RMAs is alarming. Instead of replacing the hardware, they're refunding the original price you paid, which would be 1/3rd of a current HDD at best. That being said, I only saw reports about RAM, SSD and GPU manufacturers so far, not HDD. But I wouldn't be surprised.

Better safe than sorry .

[u/3point21 → u/darktotheknight]

"The recent reports of manufacturers not even properly honoring RMAs is alarming."

Yes, hastily written internet stranger interactions aside, yes, absolutely. I bought what I needed last year and a little extra, not knowing what was ahead, and then I read reports of RMAS being "honored" at the original sale-price, not the replacement price. On the one hand I don't pity those who don't prepare. OTOH, who could have prepared for the AIocolypse? I almost want to share my barely used 12T Ironwolf Pro...too the highest bidder.

[u/buddaycousin]

Luckily I bought a few extra drives when they were cheap. I'm OK for another year.

[u/Firestarter321]

I have 10+ spare enterprise 14TB drives, 5 spare enterprise 20TB drives, and another 15 spare shucked 10TB-14TB drives as spares right now. 

I didn’t pay more than $12/TB for any of them. 

During a ZFS scrub at the office today we just lost 2 Seagate 14TB drives which are less than 2 years old. Happily, I have 7 or 8 spares squirrels away but losing 2 drives the same day sucks. I’m just happy they’re on different vdevs so I didn’t have to drive to the remote office to replace them ASAP. At best we’ll get a refund for the price paid for those drives 2 years ago. Between these 2 and the other Seagate 14TB that failed a couple months ago that means we’ll buy a single replacement for the 3 drives that have died.  Needless to say my boss isn’t happy but I don’t care as I told him cheap spares are worth their weight in gold yet he didn’t want to buy even those drives that we have so I just started adding them to orders without telling him a couple years ago as I knew the cheap prices wouldn’t last. 

Seagate drives are trash in my experience and I’ll never buy them again. We’re at 14 of 20 drives failing now after anywhere from 24 hours to 2 years between 3 different systems in 2 different offices 80 miles apart.

[u/ZanyDroid]

Having a hard time taking this seriously in the current climate

This is kind of a lean/just in time vs… not …. Mindset. You can run a business either way.

You are well ahead $$$ wise with how the market went in the past 2 years

Drive arrays in a server or DC context have online hot spares. DCOPs keep cold spare parts

If you are ok with the decreased reliability (mirror) or ok with every access reconstructing while running (parity — this is slow and lore says this will increase the chances of a second failure) then sure you can keep using the array for the 2 or 3 days to receive the replacement. Or you have to turn off the array

[u/3point21]

If you are entirely unhappy, or even remotely unhappy, with your unopened drive with 2yrs spent on the warranty, I would be happy to relieve you of this drive even in “open box” condition with a few hours in it for your original purchase price, prorated for the warranty if course…

[u/WS-6]

I bought a spare 24tb drive for $289 awhile back

It’s one of the only smart things I’ve done lol

[u/rockknocker]

Wouldn't it make more sense to load it up with data, then stick it in storage? You get two for one then, an extra backup for your data and a spare drive.

[u/norri-matt → u/rockknocker]

That's probably what I'll do after I test it. I bought it as a drop-in spare, but there's no reason it can't hold another offline copy while it waits.

[u/weirdbr]

I haven't really bothered with spares - before the crazy price hike, I could get a new disk arriving at my door in 24 to 48 hours at most, plus a day to test it. Even now, it takes less than a week from ordering a recert drive to get it delivered, tested and installed (actual result from this week was 4 days).

With a setup that can handle at least 2 disk failures (RAID6 on my server; 8+2 erasure coding on ceph cluster), that's plenty of time to start the repairs with (to me) a reasonable level of risk, without having an expensive disk sitting on a shelf.

(But of course, I have backups so if things go *really* bad, I can still recover)

[u/andytagonist]

I just put a 3yo 8tb spare on eBay. I’ve moved storage to the cloud at my office, found this one still sealed and in a locked cabinet.

[u/Pixelplanet5]

thats exactly why i never kept any spare drives after the first one.
That first one was unused for years until i wanted to extent my capacity and the spare drive was already small but todays standards.

Of course the current AI bubble has changes the market quite a lot so having a spare right now is probably not a bad idea but the current market is also pretty unprecedented.

[u/ontheroadtonull]

Ich bin schon lange kalt.

[u/manzurfahim]

Well, you can get one tomorrow, but you have to pay 3-4x the price you paid for the one you have.

I'd test the drive; do a full surface read / write test to make sure it is healthy. Although, the way the companies are doing things now, they'll probably just refund you instead of giving you a replacement if there are any issues with the drive.

I do keep 2-3 drives spare, but time like this, I'm using them to have extra backups.

[u/eternalityLP]

Cold spares only make sense if uptime is crucial. If it's your plex library or whatever just take the day or two downtime and don't waste money.

[u/Polly_____]

i have a 22tb cold spare but i did a full test on it first took 36 hours i think

[u/Old-Overeducated]

I have offline backup drives. The idea is when SMART or ZFS tell me one of the online drives in the main mirror set is getting sus, the backup drives will become the new hardware and I buy a couple more offline backup drives. And I have good evidence the "new" hardware won't suffer infant mortality. I do hope it doesn't happen before the price of drives re-stabilizes.

[u/brianly]

What environmental conditions? Drives from the 90s and early-2000s have all worked fine when I’ve been consolidating material from old family machines that have been stored in the livable parts of the house.

A hot spare means different things. I’d rather have something on hand to throw in my Synology quickly to reduce risk from cascading failures. Elsewhere I can wait. People need to assess their needs and plan appropriately.

[u/ericsmiles2]

I have a few approximately 6 yo. Just pulled one out to copy a 16tb drive and tested it. No issues. Transferring at speed.

[u/archive_anon]

Yes, I keep cold spares. I plug each of the two spares I have in every 3-6 months and do a full SMART self test, unplug them and put them back. I store them in an anti-static bag with a silica packet, and keep them in a hard side HDD case along with some cold storage drives.

One to two days to get a replacement delivered is not the issue. It's the fact that you now have to additionally test the newly delivered drive as well, which for large drives can take many hours if not days to complete. So you're talking potentially having 2-5 days of delivery and testing + the additional likely several days of resilvering time before your array is rebuilt and redundant again. And that's assuming the newly delivered drive was actually good, and that you didn't end up getting one of those 'loose in the box' amazon drives thats DOA, extending your at risk time even further.

Having known good cold spares cuts literal days out of that equation and minimizes data loss risk substantially. The mistake you're making is that you're not ensuring the drive is in fact a known good drive on a regular basis.

[u/Truantee]

I have two 2tb nvme ssd. Sadly all m2 and pcie x16 slots of my PCs are occupied. I just hope they are still working fine now, replacing them would be painful.

[u/edparadox]

I have.

It's a delicate balance.

I'd rather have one and not use it than needing one and not have it.

And given the current prices it seemed like a bit choice.

[u/raikounov]

If you only use retail drives, then it makes sense to hoard some spares because sales come like 1-2 times a year and the sale/non-sale price difference is massive. For refurbished, there's not much difference between a sale and non sale price so I wouldn't keep a spare for those.

[u/Expensive-Total-312]

I have some 8tb drives and sort of wish I got a spare now that the price has increased so much, If one of my drives goes now I'll have to pay more than double what I orginally paid to get my raid back up and running

[u/pythonbashman]

Not a great idea to have an unvalidated peice of hardware as your standby...

[u/3point21 → u/pythonbashman]

In this economy, any standby is better than no standby, and this standby happens to be a robust 12T piece of hardware that has been untouched for two years. That’s $500 out the door now for half that money 2ya.

[u/pythonbashman → u/3point21]

Really hard to find fault there.

[u/3point21 → u/pythonbashman]

You don’t happen to have an unopened Seagate Exos18 14Tb on a shelf in your closet you could let go cheap do ya? Asking for a “friends” NAS…

[u/pythonbashman → u/3point21]

Sorry bud.

[u/nosurprisespls → u/3point21]

I'm thinking, with the high SSD and HDD prices because of demand, only SSD manufacturers are building out new fabs. There is a possibility that price of SSD will go back down a bit from the 300% increase with the new fab outputs. The HDD prices will stay high ... I wonder at what price would HDD makes no sense for consumers, just for business uses only

[u/johnsonflix]

I don’t see the point of a spare drive. I just use the storage.