I see some fairly interesting prices for refurbished drives on Amazon, 35~40% cheaper than new. Example here: 16TB Seagate Exos X18 Refurbished at 166€ and New at 260€.
I am considering this option for my home NAS, running with BTRFS RAID10, plus important files are backed-up to a cloud storage, but not my media collection.
In your opinion, how risky is it to use refurbished drives ? Do you have to good or bad experience doing so ?
I buy manufacturer refurbished drives from serverpartdeals.com. They come with a 2 year warranty but I’ve never had a problem with any of them.
And they package drives correctly.
I am checking it out now, they have great deals, even after accounting for the ~40€ shipping, but I am wondering if I will have to pay additional import taxes/duty, not sure how much this would be.
At least for sweden they appear to have shipping options with taxes/duty included. I don’t have in front of me right now, but it was something like 200€ all inclusive shipping on a 500€ order. Something like that.
I was worried of the same thing, but my purchase of several hundred CAD did not have any duties applied. Of course every country and even purchase can be different.
I just bought a drive from them last month (from Canada) and just received a $60 duty bill. The time before that I got nothing. YMMV
I just bought a few refurbished 12TB WD Ultrastars off Amazon and it actually says it’s sold by ServerPartDeals. Not sure if it’s the same people but interesting if they are
Purely anecdotal but I tend to avoid any sensitive hardware purchases off of Amazon because they suck at packaging things a lot of times and I’ve had more than a few DOA components because they just tossed the box into an even larger box then apparently yeeted it down a flight of stairs
Edit: I should add that I live 10 minutes from a Microcenter which plays a large part in my overall pickiness, but that said, when I’m looking for something sensitive to handling and needs to be purchased online I stick to computer hardware retailers solely because they love packing peanuts and bubble wrap as much as the components love them
But Amazon will just replace them for free without any trouble, which is why I tend to go to Amazon for sensitive hardware, for the peace of mind.
The last time I purchased something from another electronics store, it was faulty and they tried their absolute hardest to refuse to take it back and then still wanted me to pay for a courier to return it - congratulations, you lost a customer.
It’s a gamble.
When you lose, you can simply return it.
When you win, you get a hard drive that works for really cheap.
I purchased one in 2020 that I still haven’t replaced, although I’m buying the replacement now as it has begun it’s slow certain death.
Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?
SMART tools
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX where sdX is your drive in question (sdA, sdB, etc).
| grep Power_On_Hours
| grep Power_Cycle_Count
This just tells you how much that drive was used in the past, It’s not a perfect to test but it’s what I do 🤷♂️
Comment save ! Thank you :)
Also run a health test on it. It’s less important for SSDs IMO, but it’s great for HDDs to check if there’s any obvious issues.
Don’t buy them off of Amazon. Find some place a little more reputable. You want some sort of legally valid warranty plus seller protection
Hell I don’t even buy “New” on Amazon anymore, it’s all way too shady. If I want a 3d printed novelty I’ll go there, but something I need to know won’t catch fire? No way.
I buy mine used from eBay. When I receive them, I inspect them, check SMART data, and run a test. I’ve gotten one that had a cracked connector, one with a bunch of bad blocks, stuff like that. I reached out to the sellers and they replaced them at no cost to me.
Seems fair compare to the discount. What tool can you recommend for testing the drives ? Do you have some programs that are available on Linux ?
SeaTools is a long-standing, trusted tool for HDD testing. I always have a bootable drive with the SeaTools bootable image on me for diagnosing hard drives.
https://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/seatools-legacy-support/
Keep in mind that testing a failing drive will likely make a failing drive worse. For your use-case this is fine, but for anyone else looking to test drives, please create a backup image of the drive prior to testing.
a lot of amazon sellers simply mark working pulls as “refubrished” when all they did was reformat or if you are lucky did a zero fill and check that the sectors weren’t bad.
I don’t trust reburbs that aren’t manufacturer refurbished on any site because its a huge difference in the testing and checking being done.
I do sometimes buy used drives, but I know what I am getting there vs “refurbished” - and there is usually a pricing difference which is why so many are dishonestly calling used drives refurbs.
you want to look at the sellers warranty policies. if if they actually have one besides amazons, the seller is confident in their own items longevity
Depends.
If it’s “buy from Amazon” then you can return it with no issue if shits bad.
If Amazon is just the middleman, than the seller could be scamming and will either fight returns or just close up shop. I wouldn’t buy any used electronic over $200 from a middle man because of that, so this is kind of on the line.
But modern HDDs hold up a lot better than they used to. I tend to “ship of Theseus” PC builds and I’ve got some HDDs probably 15 years old that are still going strong.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard anyone say a HDD failed. Just people remembering what it was like 25 years ago. We don’t think of innovation with old tech like HDDs, but there’s been a lot of improvements to the parts that used to fail regularly.
Exos x18 are enterprise drives that came out last than 5 years ago, I can’t imagine they were replaced because they’re all bad, just companies upgrading to newer tech. So should be fine and last you well over a decade.
I see offers from both “Amazon Renewed store” and “Seagate store”.
The HDDs I currently have in my NAS are a mix match of 6TB drive from different brands they all are 4+yo and they all have worked without issues so far, even though some are SMR. It’s running 24/7 but it’s not a very intense workload. I will need some capacity upgrade soon but I don’t feel like investing 1000+€ 😅
Direct from Seagate wouldn’t be bad, check their store first to see if you can cut out Amazon.
I was talking about random reseller stores. “Manufacturer refurbished” for things you can’t see is almost always a good idea. The manufacturer has their brand name on the line and usually go over common fail points and replace if it looks worn.
Stores/Amazon doing “renewed” means they tried to cover up superficial damage and is completely different. It might look ok on the outside and be complete junk on the inside.
Think of “renewed” as “open box returns” except it might have taken the last user 5 years to return. It’s a much worse gamble.
I’ve had one of my 6TB drives fail this year. And I occasionally hear from my friends or extended family that they have harddisks fail. Sometimes I help scrape off the data on it, if it’s someone who doesn’t do backups. So it definitely happens. Just not super often. And SMART also didn’t warn me this time. All these drives were purchased new. I’m not sure about OP’s question. Maybe I’ll try a refurbished drive myself.
Out of curiosity, how old was that drive?
I think about 8 years. I’m not sure. I bought it when 6TB drives were the best value for money. I’ve managed a few other storage systems in my life and usually they fail soon, ideally while still under warranty, or they last quite some time. But there are exceptions. And I’m not entirely up to date anymore. I wouldn’t recommend skimping on backups. At some point in time they will fail. But in my experience it’s completely random. You can’t expect a drive to last like 2 or 5 years. They’ll do whatever they want. And on average last way longer than 2 years or whatever refurbished drives have lasted when they get re-sold.
I don’t know if SPD ships to where you are but a manufacturer recertified 16TB from them goes for ~$160. I have 7 drives from them so far, 5 in continuous use since spring, no issues so far.
I am checking now, they do deliver to my play, it cost ~40€ for shipping, but they mention this does not include import/duty taxes and I have no idea how much this would cost.
I don’t know where exactly you live, but if your in the EU customs/taxes + shipping will make the deal worse, but better than expected.
E.g. for Germany, this drive would cost 382€ with UPS Saver Duties & Taxes included, instead of 273€ for the drive itself.
I’ve found the same drive with a local commercial eBay seller for 420€, including taxes and shipping.
A new 24TB drive would cost 485€.
Edit: IMO a better deal would be 22TB drives, which have the same price per TB but are new. But then again, their used/recertified price is also ~10% lower than new.
Thanks for the advice. I found that the import tax would be 80~100€. I when for eBay Germany, and ordered some drive there: 4x WD Ultrastar DC HC520 12TB, helium-sealed, for 120€ each. I will test them upon receiving and see how it goes from there :)
Great to hear you found my comment helpful.
Just make sure you make backups regularly. Especially with used drives, I wouldn’t count on them surviving the stress of a rebuild. If a second drive fails in a RAID10, all data might be gone.
Edit: I’d be thankful if you could report back how the test goes. I need a drive for a backup ;) and I’m considering buying from eBay too.
I will test them upon receiving and see how it goes from there:)
I know I’m in a different situation here but i buy all my server drives off ebay. Just got ~60TB worth of SAS drives for a little over $200 USD. Ive never had an issue. Most of these places are where business sell their drives to be wiped. Then they just put them up on ebay
Edit: bad autocorrect
I’ve not checked Ebay yet, maybe they also have interesting offers in my region? Will take a look, thanks :)
Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.
If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.
I wouldn’t buy a new Seagate drive, let alone a refurbished one. Every Seagate I’ve ever owned died in less than five years. Every WD I’ve owned lasted until long after their capacity was so far outpaced by newer drives as to be useless.
Anecdotal, yes, but it’s happened enough to me that I’ve been soured on them for life.
my first 1tb drive was Seagate.
after a firmware update bricked it I swore off Seagate for life.
I would rather eat a pound of my own shit before I’ll use a Seagate ever again.
Most of these observations are subjective. I’ve had some Seagate drives that worked well but were very hot and wasted energy. On the other hand WD was crap so far, starting with 3 TB. Not because of quality, but because of power saving features that were a major annoyance to me (green and some blue drives). Red drives I had were mostly fine, even they wore out pretty quickly (Load_Cycle_Count bugs). They ran at 0% health left for a few years and had other awful SMART and on-drive controller bugs.
Since Seagate and WD are essentially the same company and they lied about SMR before, I wouldn’t buy either of them.
With raid 10 - i would not risk it . With RAID6 ( obviously not on BTRFS) it is fair game if you have solid return policy for drives which are DOA. Go for SAS drives, they are cheaper (but generally hotter and nosier). And look for old-new-stock on specialized sites, no one in enterprise needs say 8tb drives, so they selling them cheap at times.
Get drive, connect , run long smart self-test ( for 18tb it is probably take a day). If it passed you are reasonably sure that it will not die soon. And keep running these test regularly, as soon as they start failing, replace.
I’ve bought used SAS drives from ebay. was running them in a raid10 until about a month ago when I retired the server.
ran for about 5 years on them no problems.
I do agree, there are risks buying any tech used, especially for servers.
Did it once and was disappointed. One was Sata2 instead of 3 and the other was straight up broken
I’ve had good luck with goharddrive.com. They sell through amazon as well, but I believe they ship direct. I usually get the hgst, or now wd, ultrastar hard drives. I’ve had zero issues.
Like others, I’ve had good experiences with eBay- just look for reputable sellers (good reviews, not a brand new seller, etc). Most of what I bought was fine, but the ones that were dead on arrival I was able to get replaced within their warranty window. Just be sure to test what you get as soon as it arrives.
