A friend of mine linked me to this seller earlier today. They have some pretty tempting deals, but I’ve never heard of them before.
Has anyone bought from them before and was it worth it?
Yeah, they’re legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you’re a home-labber, I’d strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I’d probably be looking at their prices.
What are you considering buying?
Thank you for the feedback
What are you considering buying?
Mainly just the HDD’s. I already have a server, but having a bunch of extra drives for cheap is really tempting, especially since I haven’t filled out all of the bays
Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability. If you’re ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don’t buy used drives because I don’t want to take the additional risk.
I’d be surprised if you can’t find a better deal on used spinning rust though… the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability.
If it helps, my strategy is to use RAID6 to handle up to 2 drive failures, and apart from the initial 4 drives needed to initially create the array, I just add another when I need more space. Then even if I get drives with sequential serial numbers, they’re going to have differing amount of life used.
Also, always keep a couple spare drives for quick swapping. Especially with RAID6 given how long rebuilding the array can take
Yes, several years ago. After a couple bad buys with people not shipping the server safely, this was the first company that packed it correctly.
I’ve bought from them several times and it’s always been a good experience.
Yeah they’re fine. TechMikeNY usually has better deals though, at least in my experience. Have bought from them several times both for work and homelab, no complaints.
