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Recertified Enterprise HDDs

S

sephkeene

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 14, 2007
Messages
97
Just a shout out to TheSlySyl on this one instead of necro posting in the, "Shucking still a thing?" thread. I ordered two 12TB manufacturer recertified WD drives from serverpartdeals.com, both have only 8 power on hours, and less than 100GB written to each.

With a $5 per drive discount code (literally: discountcode), the total was $210. Free Shipping!

I have been a member for a long time, but found the post via Google. Thanks a ton to TheSlySyl for the recommendation!
 
I've user SPD for manufacturer recertified enterprise drives as well (got something like 16+ Exos in operation right now). I don't think I'll ever buy new again due to the much better price, and the drives are past their infant mortality period.

FWIW, they do wipe the SMART data - so those power on hours and data written numbers? Yeah, they aren't accurate.
 
arestavo said:
I've user SPD for manufacturer recertified enterprise drives as well (got something like 16+ Exos in operation right now). I don't think I'll ever buy new again due to the much better price, and the drives are past their infant mortality period.

FWIW, they do wipe the SMART data - so those power on hours and data written numbers? Yeah, they aren't accurate.
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Interesting, in that case I don't know where the 96GB written on one drive would come from....
 
I usually get drives with non-wiped SMART data. I don't think wiping is that common.
 
They wipe certain drives that they have tools for. Some of these big companies that seller used and or decertified drives sell them with non modified smart data because with the data can’t be reset or they lack the tools.

SPD does sell a few that generally do not have smart data wiped, but I lost the link to the specific info.
 
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uOpt said:
I usually get drives with non-wiped SMART data. I don't think wiping is that common.
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Unfortunately, especially with many third party sellers (I am in no way implying that SPD is one of them!) will wipe the SMART data. It only benefits them, historical problems, hours of activity are better for them if they all go back to 0. Regardless of the tests you run initially, be cognizent of things like actually bad sectors, remapped sectors and pending sectors and make sure that they don't start counting up over the first few days.
 
mwroobel said:
Unfortunately, especially with many third party sellers (I am in no way implying that SPD is one of them!) will wipe the SMART data. It only benefits them, historical problems, hours of activity are better for them if they all go back to 0. Regardless of the tests you run initially, be cognizent of things like actually bad sectors, remapped sectors and pending sectors and make sure that they don't start counting up over the first few days.
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Why it is always a good idea to burn in drives for several days before they go into their final home kind of thing. Some good burn in should trigger any past issues.


So long as they still carry a warranty, while it is nice to have that past smart data, so long as it is covered, meh
 
MrGuvernment said:
So long as they still carry a warranty, while it is nice to have that past smart data, so long as it is covered, meh
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For people like us (with proper backups and uptime redundancy,) it is not as much of a problem. For a lot of others, who will just buy a bunch of drives and just pop them into production without the proper testing and/or backups it would be a tremendous problem.
 
mwroobel said:
For people like us (with proper backups and uptime redundancy,) it is not as much of a problem. For a lot of others, who will just buy a bunch of drives and just pop them into production without the proper testing and/or backups it would be a tremendous problem.
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Definitely, but also a problem they created, they can lay in the bed they made kind of thing.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Why it is always a good idea to burn in drives for several days before they go into their final home kind of thing. Some good burn in should trigger any past issues.


So long as they still carry a warranty, while it is nice to have that past smart data, so long as it is covered, meh
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How would you suggest you "burn in" a drive? Repeated sector tests? I think I have only formatted full once then used drives. I do have driver monitors that checks drives frequently.
 
aliaskary77 said:
How would you suggest you "burn in" a drive? Repeated sector tests? I think I have only formatted full once then used drives. I do have driver monitors that checks drives frequently.
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Yeah, basically repeated sector tests. At least for spinners. I don't know much about big SSDs.
Full surface, read-write-verify with several bit patterns. If you're under a BSD or Linux system, badblocks is the tool you'd want, -vsw flags. Remember not to have important data on it beforehand :D
But not through any sort of USB interface - direct connection.
I used to just let it run for a day minimum. But, it'd be even better to occasionally stop, power it down, let it cool, and repeat.
It's a pain in the ass, but you're saving yourself a lot of time in the long run. It will weed out crappy drives.
Another cool tool is MHDD, which you boot directly into. It also has some neat scanning features like measuring latency per block and showing you a summary table for each time range, color-coded for normal/suspicious/bad.
 
I am on Windows, but will look at some of these tools.
Good your clarified direct connection. I would have done it on a USB enclosure first. I will connect through the HBA when doing this.
I would never have consiered refurbished drives, but the cost saving cant be denied.
Thanks.
 
uOpt said:
I usually get drives with non-wiped SMART data. I don't think wiping is that common.
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Bit of a late reply, but exactly zero of my 24+ manufacturer recertified drives came with non-wiped SMART data. Why couldn't/wouldn't the manufacturer wipe it?

I could see a refurbisher not doing that if they didn't have those tools. But a manufacturer?
 
arestavo said:
Bit of a late reply, but exactly zero of my 24+ manufacturer recertified drives came with non-wiped SMART data. Why couldn't/wouldn't the manufacturer wipe it?

I could see a refurbisher not doing that if they didn't have those tools. But a manufacturer?
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Well, obviously the manufacturers do. I just don't like it and will buy from other places that don't wipe SMART data.
 
I've bought quite a few drives from ServerPartDeals actually. So far I've only had a problem with one of them. It's a 14TB drive that I bought as part of a pair back in Jan 2023. The other drive is working great. This drive had one or two pending sectors for a very long time, and I thought that it would stop there, as I've had a few drives do that and go on to last over 100,000 power-on hours. But recently they have started to climb, and the rate is accelerating. Suffice it to say that nothing on the drive is "important". The drive supposedly came with a 2-year warranty. It will be interesting to see how that goes.

cdi2.jpg
cdi1.jpg
 
It's like hoping a crack in a metal part under stress stops growing. It won't. At least with the metal you can drill holes at the ends to buy some time. Drives like these will go offline without warning at the worst time.
 
cpufrost said:
It's like hoping a crack in a metal part under stress stops growing. It won't. At least with the metal you can drill holes at the ends to buy some time. Drives like these will go offline without warning at the worst time.
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Or you get 5+ years out of a drive array before one poops. I installed 14 GHD Hitachi 4 tb models into an array for a client 6+ years ago. 24/7, still not a single failure. Either way it’s playing with fire if the data isn’t properly backed up. If it is, taking a chance with cheap redundant storage is a viable option imo.
 
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I've seen it go both ways. Interestingly enough I had an 8 bay QNAP that was throwing lots of 10TB Ironwolf Pros offline for seemingly petty issues. Moved them to a supermicro box with Areca 1883 host and had two go offline on init. The rest still going strong nearly a year in. One is even making a weird mechanical noise yet shows OK SMART status. It's a plex server so nothing big if it goes down. The performance is so much better too, amazing how a 4GB cache can keep a 10 year old controller still relevant today!
 
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