Do you just source these from eBay? Any guidelines for what's a good used enterprise SSD? I had considered this route after I built my ZFS array based on consumer SSDs. The endurance numbers on the enterprise drives are just so much higher.
> Any guidelines for what's a good used enterprise SSD
Micron, Samsung and Intel (enterprise, branded DCxxxx) / SK Hynix / Solidigm (Intel sold it's SSD business to SK which they merged into Solidigm) are the go to's for brands. HGST can also be good.
The best guideline is buying from reputable sellers with a decent volume of business (eg, >1000 sales with high ratings on ebay) that focus on enterprise hardware and have a decent return/DOA policy.
You should expect these drives to be partially worn (regardless of the SMART data, that often gets wiped) if for no other reason than the secure erasure process mandated by a lot of org's data security policies resulting in multiple intensive disk writes, but also due to actually having been used. Drives that have recently been released (within 12 months, eg Micron 7600) are suspect as that implies there was a bad batch or that they were misused - especially if they aren't write focused drives. Not uncommon for a medium to smaller-end large business pinching pennies and buying the wrong drives and then wrecking them and their vendor/VAR rejecting warranty claims. That said, that's not always the case, it's entirely possible to get perfectly good recently made drives from reputable 2nd hand market sellers, just don't expect a massive discount in that case.
Otherwise best advice I can give you, is redundancy is your friend. If you can't afford buy at least 2 drives for an array, you should probably stick to buying new. I've had a few lemons over the years, but since availability on the second hand market for any given model can be variable and you tend to want to build arrays from like-devices, you should purchase them with the expectation that at least 1 per batch will be bad just to be safe. Worst case scenario you end up with an extra drive/hotspare.
Disagree. You should never trust SMART data from second hand drives, full stop. No matter if it's wiped or not.
If you're US domestic market, then yeah, you can usually avoid Chinese vendors. If you're EU or elsewhere, China can often be the main/only source of affordable drives vs domestic market. Really depends (I don't shop for international buds/clients, but I constantly hear about how the homelabbers across the pond have significantly higher prices/lower availability for surplus enterprise gear in general)
Stick to the rules on reliable vendors with a return policy, buy in bulk with the expectation that some will be bad (not a given, but good to be prepared), and the only issue from buying from china is delayed shipping times.
It's not about the numbers as much as it is the LIE. There's no legitimate reason to take the extra steps to wipe a drives internal state clean. Like rolling odometers back, it has one purpose: fraud.
Oh I agree, but worrying about that in my opinion is stressing over things beyond my control as I can't verify that data is accurate before or after taking receipt of it, and it's kind of a moot point when buying a second hand consumable device as it's pretty much guaranteed to be used/worn. Also, devices can change hands multiple times before it ends up on the second hand market, with anyone in that chain potentially being responsible for fudging the numbers. It's why I start from the zero-trust assumption that the data is unreliable, always buy in quantity and always assume a non-zero failure rate of some kind (thus the reputable vendor with a return/refund policy). The failure rate is rarely actually that high in my experience, but it does happen from time to time and it sucks if you're trying to deploy for example a 4 device array, and you buy 4 devices but 1 doesn't work and as a result now the whole array can't be deployed.
