I’ve been convinced to build my own NAS again instead of going with a Synology and I’m thinking there are probably parts that don’t matter if you buy used vs new but I’m curious what your thoughts are?
The only thing I buy new are the HDD’s for the bulk storage.
I’ll buy used enterprise SSD’s for flash storage.
Oh wow, that’s awesome. No concerns buying used CPU, RAM, or MOBO? I’m assuming you buy a new power supply though right?
No concerns here.
I buy used server chassis and power supplies for my NASes.
The only new items in my primary, backup, and offsite NASes are the 500TB of HDD’s and a couple of fan splitters.
The only new items in my 3 Proxmox nodes are…nothing actually. All SSD’s, HDD’s and everything else is used enterprise hardware.
I’d probably buy everything used other than the power supply and drives.
My entire NAS is used parts, including used enterprise HDD’s. I put the gear through a thermal, memory, and IO stress tests and all checked out. I bought 10 drives when I only needed 8 with assumption that at least 2 would be bad (none of them were and they’ve been in use for > 2 years). Correction - the case was new, I uses a Rosswill rackmount.
Since I buy used enterprise drives, I suppose nothing is off the table.
Oh wait! No used thermal paste tubes.
Everything used from wall cord to drives. It either works or fails pretty fast so I can exchange or replace if it was cheap enough.