Thoughts on Refirbushed drives

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
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705
I purchased some drives off of newegg 3tb hgst drives to be exact, found out they were refurbished. My mistake on not reading the ad, I understand this

when a drive was tested it said it has ran for 19k hours, that concerns me.

is this normal? I'm thinking of returning them.

thoughts anyone?
 
I have three Refurb'd Ultrastars from Newegg running in a makeshift home server, they all run perfectly.
 
I've had a total of (5) of these refurb HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 drives with a 90 day warranty. I ordered three at first and two died within 24 hours of starting to test them - one wouldn't even long format, the other worked with a long format, writing 2.5 of 2.7TB of data to the drive, and a chkdsk /f /r /x, only to start dropping out of the disk manager after an hour or so of a write 0s test.

Got them both replaced for free, got the new ones in and tested again - only to have one drive not finish a long format (AGAIN!) and the SAME problem with the second drive when writing 0s. It's almost like they received the drives that I sent back only to put them into fresh ESD bags and send the same ones back to me. (probably not the case, as it was Newegg sold and shipped)

Long story short, 80% failure rate. HORRIBLE! No wonder they only offer a 90 day warranty on them. At least one drive is working after those same tests and it is in my secondary RAID array now.

Yes, they were all 2013 drives that had high hours, near 20K, yet low power cycle counts.
 
I've had really good luck with them but it is a crapshoot. I don't trust the SMART status as it can be reset as an odometer can be but no matter if they're open box 0 hour drives or Hitachi or wd enterprise drives with 20k hours, they truck along without slowdowns or reallocated sectors.
 
I personally wouldn't buy anything refurb. I will find a cheaper smaller / lesser speed etc. capacity if money is an issue.
 
Often times I am all for refurbished items, seeing as I worked at a facility that refurbished or clearanced (both, not interchanging the terms) items that were literally brand new. The one thing I never bit on were refurb mechanical disk drives. YMMV and I think it is one of the riskier things to go refurb with. Good luck!
 
I usually only buy ones that use certified organic Norwegian firs. Everyone just assumes all firs are good because, by nature, they offer year round availability. But there is a difference.
 
WD said their limit for refurbished drives was under 25,000 hours but wouldn't be more specific.

Seagate wouldn't tell me anything.
 
larrymoencurly said:
WD said their limit for refurbished drives was under 25,000 hours but wouldn't be more specific.

Seagate wouldn't tell me anything.
Click to expand...
Approaching 3 years of 24x7 use, they could be years older
They are selling on drives that exceed their initial warranty.
Its their reputation.
 
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I just bought two refurbished WD 250GB Caviar Blue drives for my Dell SFF computers. The drives cost $12.99 each. If one of the drives fail, so be it. The computers won't be used for anything important.
 
I purchase lots of used/refurbished computer components (I am a bottom feeder). I've been burned on hard drives more than any other component--I now avoid refurbished HDDs unless I'm desperate.
 
Ultrastars are rock solid. I have some used / refurbed ones that are approaching 50K+ power-on hours without a single SMART error (did read + zero fill tests) or weird bearing noises (purchased from all over - Amazon, newEgg, MicroCenter, Frys)

I don't care if a drive is brand new from the factory, refurbed or used.
As long as it's new to me, it better survive 3 rounds of read + zero fill without a single SMART error.
Weeded out a few drives this way, and the rest have yet to disappoint me.
 
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