Should You Buy a Refurbished Hard Drive?

Note: This video was published 4 months ago as a member exclusive, intended to be seen by our Gold Level supporters, and on Floatplane. I did this to give our direct supporters something special to watch. I may revert this back to members only after a week, but this is an example of a video that you can see as a direct supporter of the channel.

Let me know what you think about this video in the comments below!

#techdeals #storage #harddrive

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- REFURBISHED Drives -

The above listings were accurate at the time this was published, I've bought from "Tech on Tech" on Amazon and "ServerPartDeals" on EBay multiple times. I have no relationship or business with either company, other than being a customer.

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Time Stamps
00:00 Should You Buy a Refurbished Hard Drive? — Member Exclusive
01:48 New and Used Hard Drive Prices
03:51 Opening Boxes and Examing Packing Quality
05:42 Refurbed Hard Drives
06:50 Back Blaze - Back up, Back up, Back up your DATA !!!! Link in Video Description
07:13 Warranty Discussion
10:05 Thanks for Watching and Further Thoughts

[ProjectMysticApostolate]

I love this video. Thank you! I can save a ton from this. You da man daddy Tech! 🍻🍻🍻

[markp]

For what it is worth, I am a former network administrator and have dealt with thousands of hard drives. About 5 years before I retired we started experimenting with refurbished drives on our development servers. We purchased 18 refurbished drives. In the 3-5 years of using those drives, we never had a single failure.

[marklewus]

I have two NAS units with a total of 13 drives, the bulk of which are Seagate IronWolf Pro 6tb-20tb. I have operated these for up to eight years (70+ thousand hours) on time. I have had only one drive failure, and that was a relatively new one. About half the drives are refurbs.

[trippvanmunch]

I had 6 identical 16TB hard drives that I paid $250 to $400 new for over a year. I bought 2 more refurbished from a server supplier. Drives arrived and passed all SMART test with flying colors. Drives were barely used and I got 2 of the drives for barely more than the price of 1 new.

[BrianNC]

I bought a 16 terabyte Toshiba drive off of you a while back and it's been an amazing drive. I've downloaded every game on game pass and it's barely put a dent in it's capacity. Games that I actually play often sit on a sn850x. I need to find some more cat videos or something to use up some capacity. I can't wait for the day when we see inexpensive 20Tb SSD, until then I'll keep rocking a physical drive in addition to 4Tb of SSD.

[dleigh]

Take note of the advice given here. Ive bought various used drives from established sellers over the years, and no issues with any of them. The one time I bought HDD from a minimal feedback seller, the drive came in basic manila envelope, a kleanex size bit of newspaper for "padding". Drive had pending sector wanrnings. Stick with sellers who specialize in used components!

[benefitthirteen]

I'm genuinely curious as to what differentiates an item like a HDD to be considered refurbished vs used but tested and functional. When you were wondering if these drives were refurbished or new but labeled as such, it reminded me of how on a number of occasions I've purchased items from a manufacturer's eBay site listed as refurbished, but the items received were brand new. I imagined it as overstock and legalities.

[sburton]

I know when treated well, hard drives can last a long time. I still have my Toshiba Satellite 330cds with it's original 4 gb hard drive and it was made in 1998. It still runs fine with Windows 98 second edition and on scan disk, it still shows it has no bad sectors.

[IM]

Interesting, from Amazon UK (shipped from Amazon EU Germany) the following "Seagate IronWolf Pro ST16000NE000 NAS Internal Hard Drive 16TB HDD 3.5 Inch 7200 rpm CMR 256 MB Cache SATA 6GB/s Silver incl. 3 Year Rescue Service" However, my first three of an order for four arrived today rattling around in a Amazon parcel box. Anyway, unsealed one to find it is a "Refurbished Drive" and checking on the Seagate site warranty checker it says rescue service expires next April and contact seller. Yes, they may work but maybe not. Also I imagine they can reset the non volatile drive data to make one look like new. As described as new and with a three year rescue service they will be going back (when the last one arrives). EDIT: I also noticed the DOM of the drive is 25JAN2020 which is older than the drives I was going to replace!

[revolcane]

I build PC's for friends with the standard 1tb NVME or SSD and 1 2TB Hard Drives. I would get refurb Seagate Constellations at around $30, $50-$60 for 4TB drives. They are very reliable for game storage.

[deano]

I'd love to see this re-done with smaller drives that have been sold for longer.

[AceEchelon]

i boought recently 5 hdd 10 gb each from seagate, refurbished, they work, zero bad sectors or funny sounds. All depens what supplier you have and what deal. Thanks for awesome vid as always.

[tggorudon]

7:38 the fucking full on anime theme crystaldiskinfo caught me off guard 😂 I didn't even mnow you could do that

[vladislavkaras]

Would be great to have the same explanation for the SSD:s as well!
Thanks for the video!

[collinrowland]

i've been watching your channel for years and i love how no nosense straight forward you are. i've personally only ever had problems with hybrid drives in the past. Again, thank you for being so

[jeffsstuff]

i always thought refurbished products typically are returns (incompatible, ordered the wrong thing, changed their mind, etc.). They test them but can not legally sell them as “new” so they are “refurbished”.

[jamesbowen]

I buy from Tech on Tech, , 10tb sas and 14tb sata water panther drives, , absolutely the best service , , no drives failed so far, , if they do the amount I have saved far out way the cost ..

[deathcometh]

I picked up 6x 4tb back 7years ago. 1 dead on arrival. Emailed. They just sent an extra drive. Ok. Got it in. All drives under 20hrs. Slap them in a dell r710, used zfs1(so 1 failure). I spent about $300 at the time it would have been 2 or 3 times for new. That system is still running. My son was like 3 at the time and wanted to help. I was not at the server. He just started pulling drives. He was helping daddy. Even after him doing it twice, I then locked the front cover plate. I've not had any issues with the drives. I built a second server and it backs up to a different location. I try to do 3, 2, 1 backup. It's more like 2, 2, 1. I am planing to build a new updated stack, proxmox cluster HA Ceph maybe. I also need to build a small portable little setup. I travel for work and I want something with about greater than 10tb storage and a proxmox running different serves, vm, containers, very portable. Right now I have a very nice rog laptop using 2x 5tb externals (only 1tb left free).

[manaphylv]

I have no experience with refurbished drives because they don't exist where I live (outside of gray/black markets), but all the hard drives that failed on me were external drives.
They are cheaper per GB than internal ones, and I used to pull them out of their cases and use them as internal drives. But most of them failed within a year or two, so it's safe to assume that they use a lower grade of drives that are not intended for constant operation, especially not in RAID or as scratch drives. These days, I just use a Fusion-io PCI-E SSD as my download and scratch drive, which will probably outlive everything else in my PC.

[KermenTheFrog]

Backblaze is really nice a few days and it literally backed up everything over 2tb and around 2 million files. It really is a decent price for actually unlimited and longer version history is cheap to