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Disk age on Kimsufi and SYS servers
Hello,
Looking at getting a 2x2 TB server from either Kimsufi or SYS. All the servers I've got from Kimsufi (mostly KS-LE and Atoms) have had like 60k power on hours. Is this this the case for most of the servers or is it just random? I'm guessing the older the CPU is, the older the drives are?
Comments
the older you get the slower you become. so its oky.
It's random, sometimes you'll get a server with brand new disks. Luck of the draw.
Pretty much sums it up, i wasn't lucky either and received a server with fairly old drives
KS-1 I've had for nearly 9 years, so the disk was pretty new when I got it:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 089 089 000 Old_age Always - 77214
KS-LE-1 I've had for 6 months, so the disks were fairly old already:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 094 094 000 Old_age Always - 44799
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 35428
Depends on your luck as some of them can be new and some like 3-5 years old
Most KS disks that I’ve gotten have been quite old. Have never had a failure, though
aged disks are more experienced
So they do not fail on you. They just fail some day.
Both disks on my KS-LE:
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 28589
Really just depends how lucky you are in the KS casino
Most of my sys drives are around 30000 hours iirc which was similar to my kimsufi drives
I have a RISE-STOR-1 server (4 x 6TB), all are old drives too.
Generally the cheaper the server, the older the disks are going to be. Sometimes you'll get lucky and it'll have a newer disk (for example, if they've ran out of stock of very old disks) but you shouldn't expect it as standard.
My old GAME-3 (still active) at 45 EUR/mo incl. 19% VAT
Anyone ever tried recovering anything from the previous renter? Or they run ATA secure erase every time?
Thinking about that from the other side, when I drop a service I run a secure wipe myself beforehand, unless I've used full device encryption to start with (my default these days) or it has done nothing but idle. Not that I have much that is that sensitive anyway, but a little healthy paranoia is a good habit to keep IMO.
After secure wiping, or just trashing all copies of the keys to the encrypted volumes, reformat to a plain filesystem, fill that with shocker images¹ or Rick Astley videos, then do a less secure wipe, to give anyone doing a little amateur forensics after me a treat…
[1] if you don't know what I mean by shocker images, search for “tub girl”, “lemon party”, and “blue waffle” for a few examples. No need to thank me, being an educator is all the reward I need.
You can't make a list like that and miss off goatse!
Anyway, just out of interest, how do you practically do this?
I'm guessing such tools aren't normally included on a recovery image, but also not sure what hilarity will ensue if you erase the disk underneath a running system.
And more importantly, are providers actually OK with doing this to their disks? There's no chance of it messing up the internal disk management stuff that remaps bad sectors out of the way? Because if it does, you might be contributing to the early demise of their disks, and they might not be too pleased.
FWIW, I've only ever disposed of 2 drives, and that was using the hammer approach. Hit them enough until you can hear stuff moving around inside and then shake a lot. All the rest of my old drives are sat on shelves in case, for instance, I ever have a pressing need for a 20GB drive with an IDE interface.
Now there is a name I've not heard in a long time.
Do you mean old Ben Goatse?
The proliferation of images/clips to fill the space with things for people to find? Just reinstall with a simple Linux setup, drop the desired reference files into a directory, and a copy+paste shell one-liner to copies them many times (using names that look like they've come from a digital camera) into a tree of directories.
You can probably do it from the recovery image. All you need is shred or similar to do the secure wipe, and scp/sftp/wget/curl/one-of-many-other-things to copy in the source images/clips, and a reasonable shell.
A secure wipe or a physical disk that is being retired or repurposed is standard good security practise. If they are unhappy with that then… well, they shouldn't be and it is a good job I'm on my way out! At most this has the impact of one extra pass of the wipe process, this isn't like performing a massive mining operation.
A VPS provider or other services based on shared storage might be less happy, as you are performing extra bulk IO on a shared resource, but the secure wipe is pointless here¹² so you should be encrypting from the start instead if the data is in any way sensitive and the content is less likely to be found intact for similar reasons (though do it anyway for funsies, just throttle the process so it doesn't eat too many IOPS).
[1] the data may have moved around various physical locations in its life
[2] the same can be said for other storage types too, but less so
As above, the impact will be no more than a little extra of normal operation on physical disks, and similar³ on a SAN or other shared storage setup especially if you throttle the amount of IO use⁴. If anything could be messed up then the “management stuff” is far too buggy for production use and that should not be your problem.
[3] though there is less point doing it
[4] which I would do out of a desire not to be a dick to the neighbours anyway
Oh sorry. There's a specific secure erase command you can send to an ATA drive to get it to wipe itself. It was mentioned earlier, but when I googled it, the documentation suggests it really does wipe everything including internal disk management structures. I guess akin to the really old low level format rather than just a normal format.
I got lucky with my SYS-1
Type Power On
HDD 1,282
HDD 1,282
HDD 1,709
HDD 1,281
SYS1 SSD
KS-LE
DISK 1 : 60123 hours
DISK 2 : 52380 hours
KS1 fresh delivery
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 091 091 000 Old_age Always - 69592
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 091 091 000 Old_age Always - 67513
how to know the disk age?
smartctl -a /dev/sda
example bash line for gathering disk summary
KS-1 w/2TB: 62622
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 094 094 000 Old_age Always - 42612
KS 1 2TB