Hi, I seek your help once again. I’m in the need of upgrading my storage now and I found what I consider to be a good deal via Amazon on an older gen enterprise WD drive that supposedly hasn’t been used, but I’ll let the power on hours tell me the truth. The price is about 16usd/TB and I’m wondering if this is a bad idea due to the age of the drive? I’m guessing the drive would be about 10 years old maybe. The plan would be to buy 2: 1 for my cold media backups and the other would be a backup for the cold media backup.
You can get new WD drives for ~18usd/Tb. https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-sata-hdd?sku=WD60EFAX
I wouldn’t mess with older drives unless they were less than half the price. In that case set them up raid 1 and send it.
This is SMR.