“Refurbished” SAS drives on eBay

EnderW

[H]F Junkie
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Sep 25, 2003
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I know I know, refurbished hard drives?! But I was considering picking up a few of these for a 6-drive RAIDZ2. Usually HGST drives run for many years. Anyone have any experiences with these drives or similar? Easystore deals have been scarce lately.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/224010990332
 
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I hate the word "refurbished" so much. To me, in order to qualify for using that word the "refurbisher" should be forced to actually... *do* something *physical* to return a part to like new status. Like, for an engine part to be refurbished it should be cleaned, oiled, rebuilt, whatever.

The real word that should be here is simply "used". They took the drives out of a server, hopefully powered them on to make sure they actually worked, put them in anti-static and boxed them up.

With all that said, $110 is pretty decent for an 8TB drive. I'm not a fan of used things with moving parts, but at a discount of $70/drive compared to new on Newegg I would consider it. I would just make sure to aggressively test each drive and check SMART immediately upon receipt, since I don't trust an eBay seller to respond to any kind of support request for longer than 5 minutes.
 
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I hate the word "refurbished" so much. To me, in order to qualify for using that word the "refurbisher" should be forced to actually... *do* something *physical* to return a part to like new status. Like, for an engine part to be refurbished it should be cleaned, oiled, rebuilt, whatever.

The real word that should be here is simply "used". They took the drives out of a server, hopefully powered them on to make sure they actually worked, put them in anti-static and boxed them up.

With all that said, $110 is pretty decent for an 8TB drive. I'm not a fan of used things with moving parts, but at a discount of $70/drive compared to new on Newegg I would consider it. I would just make sure to aggressively test each drive and check SMART immediately upon receipt, since I don't trust an eBay seller to respond to any kind of support request for longer than 5 minutes.
I agree, the term refurbished is being abused but none of the sellers or services (eBay, Amazon, etc) give a crap. Refurbished used to mean it was returned due to a defect, defect was able to be repaired and now we are reselling it. Now they just slap that term on 10 year old used hardware... It's not refurbed, it's just used.

/Rant over
I've seen mixed reviews, I would ask them for the drive data (hours, writes, etc) before taking the plunge. If they can't be bothered, then they probably didn't bother to even check if they work. Like I said, I've heard mixed reviews, some close to new, others on their last leg. Iv even seen postings that included the SMART info and when people got it home it wasn't th SMART data for the drive they bought. So as mentioned, if you do buy, ch do that out first thing.
 
I dunno, Amazon in the UK takes refurb pretty seriously. I buy a lot of Lenovo corporate Thinkpads that way from Amazon and they all arrive with refinished keyboards and plastics and appear like they are a few weeks old at most.

But HDDs? What you gonna do other than full erase and check the SMART stats? Give it a wipe with a damp cloth? Tough one
 
I agree, the term refurbished is being abused but none of the sellers or services (eBay, Amazon, etc) give a crap. Refurbished used to mean it was returned due to a defect, defect was able to be repaired and now we are reselling it. Now they just slap that term on 10 year old used hardware... It's not refurbed, it's just used.

/Rant over
I've seen mixed reviews, I would ask them for the drive data (hours, writes, etc) before taking the plunge. If they can't be bothered, then they probably didn't bother to even check if they work. Like I said, I've heard mixed reviews, some close to new, others on their last leg. Iv even seen postings that included the SMART info and when people got it home it wasn't th SMART data for the drive they bought. So as mentioned, if you do buy, ch do that out first thing.
I used to buy drives of eBay but after a few bad experiences, I swore I would never do that again. Just saying ...
 
I dunno, Amazon in the UK takes refurb pretty seriously. I buy a lot of Lenovo corporate Thinkpads that way from Amazon and they all arrive with refinished keyboards and plastics and appear like they are a few weeks old at most.

But HDDs? What you gonna do other than full erase and check the SMART stats? Give it a wipe with a damp cloth? Tough one
Probably refurbished by Lenovo. But a drive that is a pull from a server? Corporate IT practice is to replace drives once they hit a certain age or Power On hours. So to my way of thinking, MY data is just as valuable to ME, and corporate data is to THEM. And THEY probably run RAID 5, have elaborate backups, etc. I do a disk-to-disk backup, and the make a second copy, but that's all.
 
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