datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Hook them up, run a SMART test and see what their powered-on hours and error-rates look like. If it's not a significant fraction of the MTBF, chances are you'll be fine -- assuming you're using them in a RAID or ZFS array where a drive loss is not necessarily catastrophic.
Sorry for late reply, app kept saying "this account is being verified" and I coulnd't comment or anything else.
Anyways, I kept them. One drive loss won't be catastrophic (got two mirrored and also spare backup), so I decided to go for it!