I just browsed eBay a bit and saw that older, used SAS drives can be had pretty cheap - 30€ for 4TB, but of course rather old drives, sometimes 10 years old.
Now, I wouldn’t expect ultra reliable, ultra fast, super cheap drives here. But this offer seems compelling, even buying a spare drive for higher redundancy would still be pretty cheap.
Question is: am I too optimistic here? Are these drives bound to fail within 3 months?
It can be a super mixed bag - you can get lucky and end up with a drive that has spent it’s entire life sitting on a shelf as a cold spare and was literally only powered up to be wiped so the recycler can say they wiped all the drives, or you can get a drive that has been running well over its MTBF and will fail start throwing SMART pre-fail warnings 30 seconds after your warranty expires
WD does something very similar to this for its Red SATA drives 🥲