A few days ago, Psychz had a Christmas promotion, offering an E3-1230 v2 server with 16GB of RAM and a 2TB hard drive for only $24/month. I couldn't resist and ended up buying it. These cheap dedicated servers abroad are usually equipped with used hardware, such as Online and Kimsufi. The quality of the hard drives varies, and it's possible to get one that has been powered on for 10,000 hours. The first step after receiving the server is to check the hard drive information. Let's take a look.

Installing smartmontools

We need to install the smartmontools tool to view the hard drive information. The installation methods are as follows:

# Debian or Ubuntu
apt -y install smartmontools
# CentOS
yum -y install smartmontools

Viewing Hard Drive Information

By entering fdisk -l, we can see that there are two disks, namely /dev/sdb and /dev/sda, as shown in the following image:

Entering smartctl --all /dev/sda will print all the information of one of the hard drives (some content has been omitted for clarity):

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Black
Device Model:     WDC WD1003FZEX-00MK2A0
Serial Number:    WD-WCC3F2792309
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 2b49129b7
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity:    1,000,204,886,016 bytes [1.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 3b
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       9
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   174   174   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       2266
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   033   032   000    Old_age   Always       -       49628

• Model Family: The brand name, indicating that it is a Western Digital Black drive.
• Device Model: The model of the hard drive.
• Rotation Rate: The rotational speed of the hard drive.
• SATA Version is: The SATA interface version.
• Power_On_Hours: The amount of time the drive has been powered on, in this case, 49,628 hours.

Different hard drive models have different performance characteristics, and the longer the power-on time, the shorter the expected lifespan. Unfortunately, I didn't have much luck, as the server I received had a Western Digital Black drive with over 49,000 hours of power-on time. This goes to show that buying cheap dedicated servers is all about luck.

Some Suggestions

Without RAID 1 on the dedicated server, the data security is not as good as that of a VPS. It is recommended to develop a habit of regular backups to prevent data loss.