As mentioned by another user, all drives fail, it's a matter of when, not if. Which is why you should always use RAID arrangement with at least one redundant drive and/or have full backups.

Ultimately, it's a money game. If you save 30% on a recertified drive and it has 20% less total life than a new one, you're winning.

Here's where I got some.

Manufacturer Recertified Drives | Enterprise Grade

Manufacturer Recertified enterprise drives work and look like new. Rebuilt by the manufacturer and quality tested to ensure they function as new, our recertified drives save on cost. Shop now!

ServerPartDeals.com (serverpartdeals.com)

I looked around a bit, and either search engines suck nowadays (possibly true regardless) or there are no independent studies comparing certified and new drives.

All you get mostly opinion pieces or promises by resellers that actually, their products are good. Clearly no conflict of interest there. /s

The best I could find was this, but that's not amazing either.

What I do is look at backblaze's drive stats for their new drives, find a model that has a good amount of data and low failure rate, then get a recertified one and hope their recertification process is good and I don't get a lemon.

What is the usecase for drives that large?

I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.

I too, am old.

there was a time i asked this question about 500 megabytes

no thanks Seagate. the trauma of losing my data because of a botched firmware with a ticking time bomb kinda put me off your products for life.

see you in hell.

What drives do you have exactly? I have 7x6TB WD Red Pro drives in raidz2 and I can do a scrub less than 24 hours.

That's a use-case for a fuckton of total capacity, but not necessarily a fuckton of per-drive capacity. I think what the grandparent comment is really trying to say is that the capacity has so vastly outstripped mechanical-disk data transfer speed that it's hard to actually make use of it all.

For example, let's say you have these running in a RAID 5 array, and one of the drives fails and you have to swap it out. At 190MB/s max sustained transfer rate (figure for a 28TB Seagate Exos; I assume this new one is similar), you're talking about over two days just to copy over the parity information and get the array out of degraded mode! At some point these big drives stop being suitable for that use-case just because the vulnerability window is so large that the risk of a second drive failure causing data loss is too great.

What is the usecase for drives that large?

I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.

Jesus, my pool takes a little over a day, but I’ve only got around 100 tb how big is your pool?

What is the usecase for drives that large?

I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.

What is the usecase for drives that large?

I 'only' have 12Tb drives and yet my zfs-pool already needs ~two weeks to scrub it all. With something like this it would literally not be done before the next scheduled scrub.

I have 2*12TB whitelabel WD drives (harvested from external drives but Datacenter drives accourding to the SN) and one 16 TB Toshiba white-label (purchased directly also meant for datacenters) in a raidz1.

How full is your pool? I have about 2/3rds full which impacts scrubbing I think.
I also frequently access the pool which delays scrubbing.

The pool is about 20 usable TB.

Thats exactly what I wanted to say, yes :D.

High capacity storage pools for enterprises.
Space is at a premium. Saving space should/could equal to better pricing/availability.

well, it depends. if they were dropped just because they are smr and were writing slowly, I think they are fine. but otherwise...

what array system do you use? some raid software, or zfs?

Not necessarily.

The trouble with spinning platters this big is that if a drive fails, it will take a long time to rebuild the array after shoving a new one in there. Sysadmins will be nervous about another failure taking out the whole array until that process is complete, and that can take days. There was some debate a while back on if the industry even wanted spinning platters >20TB. Some are willing to give up density if it means less worry.

I guess Seagate decided to go ahead, anyway, but the industry may be reluctant to buy this.