I just browsed eBay a bit and saw that older, used SAS drives can be had pretty cheap - 30€ for 4TB, but of course rather old drives, sometimes 10 years old.

Now, I wouldn’t expect ultra reliable, ultra fast, super cheap drives here. But this offer seems compelling, even buying a spare drive for higher redundancy would still be pretty cheap.

Question is: am I too optimistic here? Are these drives bound to fail within 3 months?