A good bargain FOR CERTAIN TASKS...
These Avolusion disks seem too good to be true. Are they? Well, yes and no... The Avolusion business model is that large companies (think eg Google) generally replace their hard drives on some sort of fixed schedule, not when each drive goes bad. Then what to do with the old (not that old, maybe 2 or 3 years) drives? Answer is sell them to Avolusion, to be resold to consumers. So what you are getting is very definitely a second hand drive. But (probably) not a drive that has actually failed in any important way. When I connected my 20TB Avolusion to driveDX to read the SMART values, everything was pretty much as expected -- - a fair amount of read/write traffic, - the usual complaints that the drive was (and always had been) too hot. EVERY drive I have ever worked with complains about this (the manufacturers seem to feel the only place fit to operate them is the South Pole) so I tune it out - zero complaints about any sort of consumables -- helium leakage, remapped blocks, anything like that. - things like temperature and noise are all pretty much as expected, nothing unusual. As per my usual new drive routine I also, straight after formatting it, ran a pass writing the entire disk with zeros, then random data, and again no faults detected/no complaints. Write speed is also what I expect (starts off around 300+MB/s, slowly drops down to about 180MB/s at the very end). Finally I then set it up for Time Machine, and everything behaved as expected. So my guess is that what I have is basically a perfectly good drive that's two or three years old, no different if I had bought it new two years ago. As compensation for those two years of extra wear, I paid about half price. So is this a good deal? Well it depends on how and why you want the drive. If this is going to be a primary work drive, then first question is, OMG, WHY? A work drive, in 2024, should be an SSD! For individuals hard drives are for backup and nothing else! So how about as a backup drive? I like to have two backup drives, one connected all the time, one connected once a week or so. I bought this Avolusion to be that sort of secondary backup drive, and I expect it will do just fine in that role. As for drive lifespan, again I don't know your experience or goals. But my experience has been that most of my drives last *too long*! I have zombie drives that still work after twenty years that I just wish would die so that I can throw them away without feeling guilty! (You can, if you know what you are doing, bundle say four or so such drives together as an AppleRAID JBOD to create say an 8TB synthetic drive, which is one way to keep getting value out them even though they are too small and too slow.) If you think it's vitally important that your Avolusion drive still be working in 2034 then, once again, maybe this is not the drive for you. But if you're older than 30 and know how this game plays out, how in ten years even the cheapest drive will look a lot more desirable than today's 20TB, then you just shouldn't care. Maybe the drive will die in 8 years? Maybe it will last 25 years? It's all a crapshoot -- just like if you buy a new drive. But the $ savings today are definite. Read more
