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 ?
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 was worried of the same thing, but my purchase of several hundred CAD did not have any duties applied. Of course every country and even purchase can be different.
Purely anecdotal but I tend to avoid any sensitive hardware purchases off of Amazon because they suck at packaging things a lot of times and I’ve had more than a few DOA components because they just tossed the box into an even larger box then apparently yeeted it down a flight of stairs
Edit: I should add that I live 10 minutes from a Microcenter which plays a large part in my overall pickiness, but that said, when I’m looking for something sensitive to handling and needs to be purchased online I stick to computer hardware retailers solely because they love packing peanuts and bubble wrap as much as the components love them
But Amazon will just replace them for free without any trouble, which is why I tend to go to Amazon for sensitive hardware, for the peace of mind.
The last time I purchased something from another electronics store, it was faulty and they tried their absolute hardest to refuse to take it back and then still wanted me to pay for a courier to return it - congratulations, you lost a customer.
It’s a gamble.
When you lose, you can simply return it.
When you win, you get a hard drive that works for really cheap.
I purchased one in 2020 that I still haven’t replaced, although I’m buying the replacement now as it has begun it’s slow certain death.
Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?
SMART tools
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX where sdX is your drive in question (sdA, sdB, etc).
| grep Power_On_Hours
| grep Power_Cycle_Count
This just tells you how much that drive was used in the past, It’s not a perfect to test but it’s what I do 🤷♂️
Don’t buy them off of Amazon. Find some place a little more reputable. You want some sort of legally valid warranty plus seller protection
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
