What are your experiences with refurbished HDDs? How risky is it? I see deals like 10tb for $89 and it seems ok for storage if I'm not reading and writing another but do ebay vendors sneak malware onto these?

Almost all my hard drives are used and I've yet to have a single failure. I still always buy a lot more than I need and keep my data triple redundant. This is the best case scenario when buying used.

Though do not EVER buy Seagates. I thought it was just a meme but the one I bought is a SMR shite that can't handle any random writing, spews bad sectors every now and then and bitrots a lot. Worst drive I've had, but it still runs.

>>106004471 (OP)
buy some enterprise tier refurbs like hgst and you're better off than brand new seagate

>>106004471 (OP)
I got a bunch of 18tb off-spec/white label seagate exos drives and they just work

>>106004471 (OP)
I bought two refurbed 18TB seagate ironwolf pro and they work perfectly

>>106004471 (OP)
>What are your experiences with refurbished HDDs?
would never buy anything that says "refurbished" - not even once.
>How risky is it?
extremely. you don't know the true condition of it or what some retarded monkey did to "refurbish" it. don't waste your time. NEVER buy refurbished anything.

>>106004573
>>106004963
>>106005544
>>106005557
> morons playing russian roulette with data
nice.

>>106004471 (OP)
I had no idea there was even a market for this. It sounds completely insane.

>>106004471 (OP)
You buy 3 of them at that price and put 2 of them in RAID1. The other is for off-site backup. Hedge your bets.

>>106005925
>[I] keep my data triple redundant
Retard my data is safer than yours

>>106006049
I hope one of those is off site.

>>106004471 (OP)
I had very good luck with drives that are running 24/7 to the point I don't care about hours at all. Most of my drives rolled over the counter at idk 75k hours or so. They all work.

>>106006049
>>[I] keep my data triple redundant
yeah i bet you do. on refurbished drives no less. shut the fuck up, thanks.

>>106005944
I assume they keep the casing, but give you new platters?

used SAS enterprise drives on ebay is the best deal i could find. you gotta have redundancy for drive failure anyway, so them being old doesn't matter - what matters is the overall cost. yes, you'll need a HBA, might need to reformat the disk to the correct sector size and put some tape over the 3V pin, but with new SATA drive prices being what they are, it's still absolutely worth it. they usually come with at least some sort of warranty too.

>>106004471 (OP)
>refurbished HDDs
they all have forged SMART values and non seagate don't even have FARM values (which also can be forged)
>DE:
https://www.computerbase.de/news/storage/auch-farm-werte-gefaelscht-betrug-bei-seagate-hdds-wird-immer-raffinierter.91694/
>EN:
https://www-computerbase-de.translate.goog/news/storage/auch-farm-werte-gefaelscht-betrug-bei-seagate-hdds-wird-immer-raffinierter.91694/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

good luck you glorious suicidal fools. saving money to buy twice.

>>106004471 (OP)
Refurbished? What have they done to the HDDs to do that?

>>106008270
addendum:
just in case someone immediately say "but I don't buy seagate!"
>Toshiba and Western Digital HDDs, as they don't have the FARM values that Seagate does
ALL REFURBS == TRASH

as long as vendors don't use efuses for SMART value storage you can always reset, or at the least you can use a donor control board on a bad drive and upload servo data. you never get something working.

>>106008283
>What have they done to the HDDs to do that?
removed the dust, printed new labels and faked smart values

>>106008294
Valuable service then

Apart from spoofing smart values, I'm also curious like op about malware. What software would be useful for doing a full thorough analysis or wipe of these drives? Can't they create hidden partitions or something with malicious code?

>t. poorfag also thinking about this now

It's the most cost-efficient way to get large amounts of storage. I've bought 3 over the past couple years and haven't had any problems yet, knock on wood. If you have redundancy, good automated backups, and SMART monitoring, you'll be fine. If you buy from sellers that offer 3-5 year warranties themselves it doesn't matter so much if the SMART data is fake.

Why tf do you need 10 TB? Lmao what are you niggas squirrelling away on your drives

>>106008565
That's extremely unlikely. You should be thoroughly testing the drive before you put any data on it, just like a new drive, and that would involve wiping it completely multiple times over. I use https://github.com/Spearfoot/disk-burnin-and-testing for this.

>>106008597
wouldn't you like to know, Fed boy.

(Lots of Films, TV series, rare/old online content, music, some cartoons/animes. It adds up.)

>>106004471 (OP)
ive bought 4 refurb 12tb exos so far and they have been ok. been about a year or two

For a while I was only buying used HGST drives. They had good prices. But now they aren't big enough so I have to buy new ones. I still get old ones for offline backups.

I had one drive be bad clicking on arrival so ebay refunded it.

>>106008565
just reformat the drive before using them and you're good

I have 9 hgst 10tb used drives. no issues.

i bought a 4tb hdd off ebay for 30 dollas and use it mostly for .flac music and have never had any issue with it. i wouldn't put anything too important on it though.

>>106008283
proper hdd refurb requires replacing the motor and heads, but im guessig 90% of the ones you find on ebay are probably " recertified" rather than refurbed which just means they found no issues with the drive.