eBay is FULL of Cheap Hard Drives! What's the Catch?

We’ve said more than once to never buy a used hard drive. But file sizes are increasing across the board, so could it actually make more sense to turn to the used market – like ebay or craigslist - for more storage capacity…even if the hard drives were used for crypto mining?

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

FOLLOW US
---------------------------------------------------

MUSIC CREDIT
---------------------------------------------------
Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
2:02 Hard drive mining
2:54 What we got
4:13 Shipping and buyer protection
5:10 SMART data
6:27 Did we get mined drives?
8:34 Let's use them for something!
9:50 A darn good deal
10:36 Aww shucks
11:34 Is it worth?
12:47 Outro

[TexRobNC]

That reseller warranty and recertification process is most likely, Step 1: buy a laser engraver Step 2: claim you recertify drives and brand them as such Step 3: offer a warranty, so people feel safe. Tommy Boy said it best.

[gzzuss]

Impressive how Linus had pass his skills of dropping things to everyone that host videos

[paulbrooks]

An investigation into old, used SSDs, the prices, drive health, and pros and cons would be really useful.

[kronoskai]

Just an inconsistency note: the table at 5:38 indicates that the WD drives indicated all 5 SMART fields of concern, but Alex says right after that it was Seagate who covered all 5 SMART fields of concern, not WD. The screengrab shown when he says this seems to agree with Alex rather than the editor on this one.

Edit: lots to keep track of in this video, quite a good job overall

[jakestocker]

I've gotten some amazing deals on used hard drives. Got like 5-6 Firecuda drives that I'm pretty positive weren't even used. Payed like $10-$20 a piece for 1-2 TB drives.

[ShooterQ]

For Chia, just writing the final plots to the drives doesn't wear them too greatly, but if they were used as the temp drive to make the plots, then the write amount goes up exponentially.

[TjHall-fwfd]

Used to work at a little computer repair shop. We had all kinds of hdds from SSD upgrades that people didn't want. One time a youngster came in with $3. We have him a box and said he could take 10tb he was so happy

[Corpsecrank]

Having done this for over 20 years myself my experience is also that a drive either fails in the first year or 2 or it lasts till the end of time. If a drive makes it more than a couple years you can probably trust it for at least 10 years of use under normal conditions.

[swirrllfolfsky]

That serverpartdeals seller has always been pretty good in my experience. I've gotten a few 8tb wd enterprise drives from them, and they're always super responsive

[andrewbedia]

If you do a follow up, I encourage you to cover usage of tools like badblocks and hard disk sentinel's reinitialize test for burn-in testing drives. In the dozens of new and used drives I have had, it has been very reliable at catching early failures before the ebay money back guarantee/newegg return window closes. None of them that have passed this test have failed before they were re-sold years later, personally. Cheers!

[julius]

Chia is very lightweight on storage drives. So if the eBay listing specifically states it was dedicated to farm chia it is most likely better than the majority of other used drives out there.

[adamkinch]

I grabbed a whole bunch of Seagate x16 drives that were ex-chia mining for all around $200 a pop, bargain.
Very glad you guys did this video, helps educate what to look for.

Fortunately my seller did amazing packaging, but another issue here in Aus is drive on Amazon shipping from US basically loose in a box. Really bad.

[filpoamati]

I can’t wait to see how many he drops them this time

[Piketom]

Even on the fast internet I have, it can take over an hour to download larger games. An inexpensive HDD is a pretty decent solution to keep games stored locally if you are not currently playing them and want to keep the ones you are playing on your SSD.

[IzzyIkigai]

Adding to the anecdotes: From my work experience enterprise drives rated for 5 years usually hold up at least 50-60k hours and I'm currently emptying some drives on a personal server that have 72k hours and still run just fine(the server just got superseded). BUT some hard drives just die in the span of a year or two. It really just depends on luck more than anything.

[JonnoHR]

An important warning you missed, particularly in relation to shucking drives - if you plan on using any ZFS based OS (Xigmanas, freenas etc) DO NOT use any SMR drives, which are commonly used in those portable hard drives that people shuck, which is why they're cheaper in the first place.

[jkl]

I have a 30gb HDD from way back in 2008, that still works relatively well. It's used right now as a storage for some games like XCOM and other, older, titles. It's being read and written to somewhat infrequently, as it's not a boot drive for anything, but still, kind of amazing that it still works.

[johndicus]

I got a Toshiba 16TB Enterprise helium-filled drive through Ebay and it had just a couple hundred hours shy of one year's worth of hours and only something like 20 on/off cycles. It was perfect! (still is). Quiet and super-fast.
I liked it so much I ordered another one and never got it to be recognized by the computer. I wrote them and they wrote back and asked me to send it back... super easy. I got reimbursed and ordered another form the same people and it went in just fine and works as well as the first, but this one had about a year's worth of hours and 24 power-cycles. It is as quiet as the first one. All three were sent pretty well packaged with sealed ESB bags and foam around them.
I also got some SSD's (4TB Samsungs) for about $60 off regular price, but 'open box and 'tested'. They came in envelopes, but packed with cardboard, ESD bag sealed, no label or original box as they must be kept for records. One power cycle and 67GB written and erased, otherwise, just like new ones. And since these things might last for decades, I figure as long as they are in good shape when I get them, they'll probably stay that way.

[vmaldia]

I have bought a cheap external hard drive from suspicious sites that when shucked contained a failing second hand drive

[codyn]

I bought a "new" hdd on ebay awhile ago. I checked the crystal disk info for it and it had been used for like 2 years. You really got to be careful with buying hdds.