A while ago I got myself an used business desktop to turn into a NAS. Put a couple memory sticks in it, a small SSD to run TrueNAS, filled it to the gills with HDD. Filled to the gills, in this case, means using all 3 of its drive bays and onboard SATA connectors with two 3.5" HGST 4TB drives and one 2.5" Seagate 4TB drive. The drives were all used, the HGST bought on a used server parts website (they now have 9 years of power on time), the Seagate through eBay (and reporting almost no usage time, which of course was false). This is all too high-stakes gambling for this group, so I spared you this story.

A couple weeks ago the Seagate small drive was no longer answering SMART diagnostics. And now it really started crapping out. So I thought I’d be less of a cheapskate and buy a brand new drive. Even spinning drives have gone up in price nowadays with the gestures broadly at everything going on. 2.5" maximum size means I can’t really put a server-grade HDD in, so another “notebook” Seagate BarraCuda is what I got that fit my budget. 5TB this time. Seller seems legit, what I could understand from what smartmontools spat out, it seems kosher. Not like I know what else I could do to check the authenticity of the drive / make sure it’s actually new.

So, conveyance test passed, short test passed, and overnight long SMART test passed too. It’s now re-silvering the RAID.