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 ?

  • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    24 days ago

    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.

    • Synapse@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      24 days ago

      Maybe there is a way I can test the drive upon arrival, would you have some tools to recommend ? Preferably available on Linux ?

      • foggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        101·
        24 days ago

        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 🤷‍♂️