Factory refurb hard drives

[DanNeely]

How well do these compare in terms of reliability vs new drives? Geeks.com has a bunch of laptop sized drives, mostly from Seagate, for sale. I'm considering using on to resurrect an older celeron laptop, and am thinking about using one to keep costs down. The smaller capacity isn't an issue, the person who'd be using it hasn't filled the 20gb HD on the laptop she got in 03 yet so my only concern is if they're abnormally likely to drop dead in a few months.

 

[athlon1.2]

If they are the "Seagate Certified Repaired Drives" (with a different label than the new drives) it's the same thing that Seagate would send you if you did an RMA. Not sure if that makes you feel better but I wouldn't hesitate to use them if I was on a budget.

 

[Chimel]

I don't think there is such a thing as a refurbished hard drive, it's not like they open it to replace a defective platter.
The only thing they do is run a scanning tool to spot bad sectors and maybe lock them out, and give you a limited warranty.
Maybe you can save even more money buying a plain second hand disk and running the scanning tool yourself.

 

[schnell]

I don't think there is such a thing as a refurbished hard drive, it's not like they open it to replace a defective platter.
The only thing they do is run a scanning tool to spot bad sectors and maybe lock them out, and give you a limited warranty.
Maybe you can save even more money buying a plain second hand disk and running the scanning tool yourself.

wrong.

Refurbished products are subject to higher scrutiny that normal products sold as "new."

In a hard drive factory lets say it produces 1,000 drives per hour. Of those 1,000 drives maybe 10 are spot checked and the entire run is deemed to be good. This is why computer parts and hard drives especially have a higher than normal DOA rate.

Refurbished products on the other hand have to pass higher QA checks that new, but every single one is checked. There is no spot checking in refurbished products.

I can not vouch for what does and does not get replaced on refurb hard drives but most DOA hard drives have dead controller boards not platters/read heads. When being refurbished any part that does not meet or exceed spec for new is replaced. That means that is there was a problem with the platters it would be replaced if it did not meet spec for new. However in hard drives there is a margin of error for manufacturing. All most every hard drive has a bad sector or two from manufacturing but it is disabled during the manufacturing process. It is also worth noting that almost half of refurbished products were manufacturing overrun, unopened returns, and open box items. Most if not all hard drive manufactures will send you a refurb drive in RMA because there is much higher likelihood of it being good because of the higher QA of the refurbishing process.

Speaking from experience I have had many new hard drives fail but I have yet to have a single refurbished hard drive fail. My home file server is all refurbished drives and I feel completely safe. If you choose to buy refurbished hard drives, and I see no reason not to, always buy manufacturer refurbished hard drives. Everything I said does not apply to 3rd party refurbishing as they are not subject to the same rules and regulations as the original manufacturer. No matter what you do remember to always backup your data because any hard disk can fail at any time without warning.

One other thing worth noting: There is a very large number of refurbished Seagate 750GB and 1TB drives on the market from the whole bad firmware debacle. Many Many people returned their drives to Seagate as dead and they had to do nothing more than re-flash the firmware. These drives especially are very safe and I am running 12 of the 750GB refurb flavor for almost 2 years now without issues.

 

[larrymoencurly]

A long time ago at WD's forum, a WD employee said their refurbished drives were virtually new, except for the aluminum casting, and even it received a new anti-stick coating. I don't remember what he said about the electronics, and I think this was back when they still used electrolytic capacitors. Somewhere else I read that all drives were tested for about 3 days at the factory, but much more recently II read that the factory test is just 30 minutes. I assume that's after the defect scan because a SMART extended test takes about 2 hours per terabyte. Seagate said their recertified or refurbished drives (I can't remember which) never had more than about 25,000 hours recorded in their SMART data. OTOH why is the SMART data for the total hours of operation, start/stop count, etc. for those drives erased?

 

[DanNeely]

Probably because if they displayed if you've have idiots gaming the system trying to get a drive with <10 hrs on it. Less cynically because if they swap parts there isn't a single number to look at.