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Recertified / Refurbished HDDs
I figure this is one of the best places to ask about recertified / refurbished hard drives 
. Curious about experiences of people here with vendors such as serverpartdeals or GoHardDrive on their recert/refurb drives. I've purchased from GHD in the past and honestly was overall happy, but I figure its been almost a decade!
Comments
It's a hit/miss. Generally - we've had very postive experience with select vendors.
I have a home NAS stocked with 12tb drives from goharddrive. They've been going great so far. Plus, they were only $75 each.
Care to share which vendors have been the best? Failures are going to happen, but I think support will be critical here!
Do you know if they were refurb or recertified?
As a former DC technician, the drives I replaced most were newish (1-2y/o) seagate drives, had ~45 waiting to be RMA'd.
As for re-certified / refurbished, I have had amazing experience with with HGST / UltraStar drives, dated 2017 (re-certified) humming along with zero concerning errors (not even a single reallocated or CRC error). Vendor / brand will go a long way.
You can get some really nice UltraStar recertified 10TBs for ~80-90 USD on eBay.
Generally good, but you have to test them -- sometimes you'll get ones in pre-fail state. Do some basic read/write loads and check smart results afterward to look for failure signs.
Deploying with redundancy is also good (I would do that for new drives, too).
Refurbished spinning disks can be trouble.
Got a factory recertified 4TB Seagate IronWolf for my workstation, for half of the price of a new one a few years ago. SMART values were perfectly fine, and still going to this day.
Great point! Need to make sure they're good and really broken in before deploying any.
We've purchased a few in the past and they are fine. GoHardDrive and ServerPartDeals seem to mostly source them from Seagate directly (at least, the "Manufacturer Recertified Drives")
If you pick up certified drives off Scamazon, stay far away from MDD. Most of the time they "recertify" it by zeroing the SMART attribute table but all their problems are very present. The ones I've had experience with are HGST/WDC or Toshiba drives with their old label removed, and their shitty white label on it. Their trademark certification you just got had.
At anyrate, anything you get refurbished should under go a full WRV before you can vet them into use anyways.
Hit or miss but some brands/models have the longevity, independent of the seller. You should test, but large sellers and a few years/owners - not sure how trustworthy that SMART data is.
I hesitate to type it but I have continued to buy the 10K RPM Velociraptors used and abused for my SATA ports as recently this year where I don't need nvme and those from 2010-2014 are outliving purchased-new cheap sata SSDs, firecudas, WD surveillance hdds. Dell U.2 NVME for the compatible server I have, also reliable used and a similar age. A few mentions above of HGST large capacity - running a pair of those 2 years now (drives at 5 yrs?), so hope to be pleased. Yes mechanical wear is why drives fail, but consistent manufacturing is also a big enough issue that it's good to hit the sweet spot of old-enough used drives that proved themselves not-lemons. Have backups.
When I built my first NAS, I bought my drives from official resellers (Provantage, Newegg) and got scammed by Newegg official (Essentially other region / non-new drive sold as new. Serial is non-US region, no US warranty). After that I resorted to Server Part Deals and have been happy since.
Provantage is great though, just a bit more pricier than Amazon / Newegg etc.
I would not use the larger capacity HDD drive without any RAID redundancy and without any backups though. Not for new drives, and not for refurbished.
OVH uses some old-school UltraStar (like 7K4000) from that era in their Kimsufi servers.
They were refurbed by goharddrive. Basically server pulls that had some high numbers on them, but 0 bad sectors. Has a 5 year warranty on them from goharddrive. These are 12tb Ultrastar HC520 drives.
@filtered you can check out also @LukeRhino
How do you refurbish a drive ? Open it up and vacuum out the dust
align the platters ? grease the bearing ? I can understand re certified but not refurbished hard drives or SSD for that matter. enlighten me. thanks
Most likely surface testing, and shuffling the G list into the P list. Maybe some firmware testing, slap a new QA sticker on it and call it a day. I doubt they do anything with the internals of the disk.
Thanks for the reply. wasnt familiar with the G and P list. Looked it up.
https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-drive-defects-table/
So testing, bad sector management, and firmware verification/upgrade. Got it
Naw I've bought used drives for personal use and had mainly good results. Like it was said, it's a crap shoot. Mostly when I wanted to expand existing arrays.
And than what? Wash and dry condoms?
Seagate Exos X20 20TB - Had good luck with buying these refurbished so far.
They certainly do exist. Depending on how we differentiate refurb from recertified and restored drives. Now the question is if you could find a refurb X24,2X or M series. If you find one of those, let me know I like to try a Exos 2X or a M series drive if I can get it cheep enough ($7 pls)
https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-drive-defects-table/
That article is kind of crap. The P list can have a impact on the performance of the drive. Its not like the manufacturer can slip in a replacement sector without it having some sort of impact. I reckon every new drive out there will have entries in its P list, since its hidden, nobody really knows without some fancy tools.
Always a good idea to do a full WRV on a new hard drive too. Infant mortality on new drives is still prominent issue. And since it takes a long time for testing on these large HDDs, I'm willing to bet no one does a long format let alone test the drives.
I agree. That was my experience last time around with spinning drives a couple years ago.
While I never really ran into a problem with new WDC disks back when I bought them, it's just easier to catch underlying issues before you have data on them. Also when you buy them off eBay it's much easier to format the whole disk and see if it has a problem. I got a batch of some 4TB WD golds (used with relatively little hour time) each one had at least 1TB completely unusable about quarter way into the drive. But would format fine (besides some filesystems like EXT and XFS).
Much easier to report it back to the seller immediately than to find out a month later.
If you're using them in a server with sufficient redundancy (think like ZFS z3), check the state of drives before you put them into service, and make sure they're not all from the same lot, absolutely no problem using used drives.
-- Just make sure you're comfortable dealing with recovery when they fail. If you're using an FS that can scrub for errors, correct errors, and handle disk failures, used / new doesn't really matter.
One of my home servers is loaded with 12 used rust-drives bought from server-pulls on ebay. I just varied the brands of the drives and bought spares. To date, in 5 years of operation (server is also used, bought at 150$), only one disk has failed. Absolutely worth it.
EDIT: There's another way to think of this. Whenever you lease a server from any provider, you're leasing used hardware. Most of those servers you lease treat you well, right?
Just make sure the seller is reputable. (like in the server-pull example where you know it was-working when it was taken out of service)
Alot of the time "recertified" drives are just decommissioned drives that were bought and are being resold. Not necessarily disks that had problems or were repaired. You can always ask the seller.
It's definitely a gamble trusting vendors on used drives, as even a generally reliable vendor can get a bad batch of drives that pass tests, but then have a way higher failure rate than normal because of whatever the drives did earlier in their life.
Something else worth considering is that some models are more reliable than others, even from a manufacturer like WD/HGST that has a pretty good reputation generally. The Backblaze Drive Stats data can be useful in determining which models are the safest to look at.
$75? Say what now? Link?
That sale is long over... Got that price back in Sept last year. This is the current listing:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/156046813385
In my opinion it's hit or miss (I'm in europe). If you already have a good backup solution (close 3-2-1 backups) then sure it may be worth the risk.
Also look at the warranties, most of refurbished/used drive the constructor warranty is not applicable and instead it is the reseller warranty (so you end up with 1-2 year warranty instead of 3-5 years)
My experience was kinda bad, i purchased a seagate exos drive that was marked as "new" but turns out it was a used drive from 2021 where the smart values were reset and farm values revealed it was 2 years old on a failing state. So i returned it with full refound.
And for these fake new drives, the problem is going to get more and more present for all retailers due to these illegal workshops that craft used drives as new drives and all brands of drives are targeted, not just seagate. So to buy new, i only recommend official sellers and partners.
Ended up with 2x new WD Red pro 16t on sale at western digital official website, quite happy with them and i got 6 years of warranty with a special offer. They are the same batch, but it is my third backup server that i put as raid 1 for the same data so it is relatively fine for me.
Gosh, I would really appreciate it if I could get that kind of $/TB price! My friends and family have me making TrueNAS setups for them, and I am not getting close to that range. That is $6.25/TB, and the least expensive these days is aboot $11.50/TB.
It's a good decision but you know buying used products is always a gamble