Western Digital 6TB Ultrastar DC HC310 7200 RPM SATA 6 0Gb s 3 5 Data Center Internal Hard

Great value for the storage, can't go wrong here Read more

These are ultra reliable drives and data centers pull them proactively, so you can probably (emphasize probably) get a lot of life out of them. They are FAST and for 7200 RPM drives very quiet. I bought three. All of them were clean and had the basic SMART data wiped (so they show zero hours of service). However, the extended data was intact. One of the drives was two years old and, I checked the SN, still under warranty from Western Digital. All of the drives were clean and looked like they had run 24/7 (very low power cycle counts). They had been regularly tested, too, so it was clear the drives were pulls from some well-run data center. The other two drives were 5 years old but similar. One of those drives had 12 read recovery counts. I'm not sure if that was from before or during my burn in/RAID sync. But the number stayed at 12 and didn't seem very alarming. There were no errors, so the recovery worked like it was supposed to. Other than that, the drives were perfectly clean on errors and had generally good stats. For a consumer drive, 5 years is a lot. But these aren't consumer drives. In a RAID 5 or RAID 6 where you will survive a single drive failure, these are a good value. They are made to last and made to operate. But they are used so you are taking a chance. Plus, because they are surplus, yours could be different. But it does seem like the reseller did a basic clean/test/and they were well-packaged. The drives are noticeably faster for things like resync than the old Toshibas they are replacing. Those are consumer drives and, apparently, the data center firmware is better optimized for RAID workloads. Both drives were 7200 RPM and 6GB/s SATA, but the resync times were faster, the more of these were in and the fewer Toshibas. Looking at the stats, you'll see the performance is rated higher. If you don't know how to rebuild a RAID array and you aren't comfortable running a SMART utility, you should probably go buy some new disk drive. If you are, though, and you are willing to take some risk, these are a cost effective upgrade. I did ask the seller about their warranty and got no response. The listing implied a 5 year but I suspect that is just talking about the WD warranty which, mostly, is expired (I have about a year and a few months left on the younger drive) the other two are out. But, hopefully, won't need it. Read more