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?
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?
Motherboard, CPU and RAM - no problem at all (more accurately, problems are easy to spot with diagnostics and they shouldn’t wear out).
Chassis - a bit of a wild card. The backplane in one of my systems is faulty.
PSUs - ideally new.
HDDs - almost all of mine are secondhand. Enterprise- or NAS-grade drives should have many years of life left. Ideally buy new to benefit from warranty but my experience has been great.
SSDs - nope. Buy new. I bought some secondhand Samsung SSDs and they developed problems, both threw IO errors after a few weeks. SSDs are cheap enough not to bother with secondhand.
Everything else I bought used, including the rack. In fact, the only things I bought new in my entire homelab are my router and WiFi AP.