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 ?
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
