I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you’ve got considerable cash.
Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that’s a good candidate for more white label drives.
I’ve had the same experience. The first HDD that failed on me was a Barricuda 7200.11 with the infamous firmware self-brick issue, and a second 7200.11 that just died slowly from bad sectors.
From then on I only bought WD, I have a Caviar Black 1TB from oh, 2009-ish that’s still in service, though it’s finally starting to concern me with it’s higher temperature readings, probably the motor bearings going. After that I’ve got a few of the WD RE4 1TBs still running like new, and 6 various other WD Gold series drives, all running happily.
The only WD failure I’ve had was from improper shipping, when TigerDirect (rip) didn’t pack the drive correctly, and the carrier football tossed the thing at my porch, it was losing sectors as soon as it first started, but the RMA drive that replaced it is still running in a server fine.
If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.
If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.
And the long term plan there is to strangle sites and take %100 of the adrev spend for themselves since users won’t ever leave the Google site. Either way Google as a search engine enters a death spiral, it’s already bleeding users.
Google used to provide a ton of traffic, they hoard it all themselves now through AI and summaries of content. Eventually the balance of cost/benefit will shift and Google will suddenly see itself rejected from scraping, furthering the product deathspiral.
Imagine the price hikes when they need to get that return on hundreds of billions they’ve poured into these models, datacenters and electricity.
EU should forge ahead and just wait for America to hopefully come to senses and end it’s entitled temper tantrum.
What a coincidence, I was just reading sections of Blindsight again for an assignment (not directly related to its contents) and had a similar thought when re-parsing a section near the one in the OP — it’s scary how closely the novel depicted something analogous to contemporary LLM output.